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RAM manufacturers have a history of colluding to drive up prices - look up their anti trust legal trouble in the late 90s / early 2000s. AI is merely a convenient excuse for straight up gouging..
Hard drives are a similar story.
These companies have no incentive to radically increase production - the incentive is for them to squeeze out smaller competitors, and engage in price fixing and keep profits high.
The complaints about RAM prices are kind of funny, when you have experienced the shortages that were caused by a fucking plastic factory in Japan burning down. Turned out that all RAM casing in the world was based on plastic from that single factory!
RAM has on occasion since the 80's increased in price due to shortages, but also due to cartel agreements, and they've always come down again.
It may take a couple of years, but the they will come down for 2 reasons. 1, production will increase because it is extremely profitable. 2, the high prices are caused by overheated AI demand. That demand will cool down, as new market opportunities slow down.
It's not a matter of if but when
Wait until 2027 or 2028, if at all possible. The variable here is 'when', not 'if'.
Not for at least a year.
Unless the AI bubble pops it’s gonna take a while for manufacturers to expand their capacity. Some are purposely not expanding as much as they should to match the demand. Either out of greed, or possibly in case it pops so they don’t end up with oversupply again.
Do any of you expect that there’s going to be substantial drops in RAM prices within the next year?
I would not bet on prices dropping substantially in 2026. I don't have the ability to first-hand assess the situation, but what I've seen from articles suggests that you're most-likely looking at sometime in 2028 before memory prices start really coming down.
I am confident that memory prices will come down. From what I've read, it (normally) takes about 4-5 years to build a new factory from scratch. That's probably an outer bound, since as long as memory manufacturers can get capital (which hasn't been a problem; lots of companies want to give them money for memory), they can build out production.
Micron announced a second facility in Boise, Idaho in mid-2025, and said that it would start producing in 2027 (though from what I've read, it normally takes additional time to come up to scale).
https://boisedev.com/news/2025/06/12/micron-boise-second/
The company said production output is scheduled to start in 2027.
If you use that as as a baseline, maybe three-ish years if a company can build where they already have facilities.
What you might do is, if you have four DIMM slots and can live with just upgrading two, just upgrade two. Then in 2028 or whenever, upgrade the other two slots.
I'd also add that prices probably won't get down quite as low as they were about a year or so back, because memory manufacturers were losing money then (well, unless cost of production drops, which does happen to some degree over time).
Also, there's going to be a lot of pent-up demand by that time, so I'd guess that prices will more-likely come down slowly than quickly. A bunch of businesses will have extended their upgrade cycle, and they're going to want new hardware. Various hardware devices that may be deferred (maybe the Steam Machine 2, for example) will start being manufactured. Individuals are going to want to do upgrades that they've been waiting in exasperation to do, just like you. So I'd expect prices to slowly walk down, with people willing to pay more getting an earlier spot in the line.
Are there scenarios where they come down quickly in 2026? Well...major wars/disasters/etc that cause demand to drop more than supply. If everyone in the AI industry decides that the future is down some path other than needing a lot of HBM (which I don't think is going to happen in 2026, though maybe it'll happen down the road). If investors by-and-large decide that AI providing major returns is all way, way out much further than expected, and that more research needs to be funded before memory purchases do, which I wouldn't bet on. I can't think of many ways in which demand for DRAM would suddenly unexpectedly collapse or supply suddenly unexpectedly explode.
You rarely see such well reasoned responses on reddit. I think I like it here. Bravo sir!
Generally speaking discounts come when retailers have more product in stock than they want, so they need to dispose of it. It is not likely that retailers will somehow end up with a glut of RAM that they need to get rid of, because there's not a whole lot of consumer-usable RAM being manufactured right now.
RAM itself isn't scare, it's the silicon wafers that can be made into consumer RAM chips or specialized integrated RAM/GPU layers that consumers can't use. OpenAI is paying Samsung and Hynix to hold the wafers for them, which means that others can't use them for either purpose.
If OpenAI goes out of business or scotches the deal, those wafers will become available, but not necessarily for consumer RAM. Another AI builder may scoop them up. Or Samsung and Hynix will just hold on to them to purposely create artificial scarcity. Either way, retailers aren't likely to end up with overstock to discount.
Yea, but it'll probably take ddr6 to really catalyze that....
Then you'll have a very limited window between the overstock of the last gen until it catches up with the ceasing of production of the last gen. Then... I dunno but it's probably going to be a used part so bid low. ;)
Seriously... The difference between ddr3/4/5 isn't really significant. Heck. Some ddr2 clocked like champs with tight timing. Modern ram is mostly just increasing sequential bandwidth. Doing jack shit for 4k(or smaller) random IO (actually "ram.", where R means random!)
The difference is no where near HDD vs SSD.
Like, a HDD speed is probably closer to your Internet speed than HDD v. SSD, especially high end SSD.
You probably don't need more RAM, as you haven't articulated a reason for such.
You might just enjoy some spring cleansing. Uninstall apps you don't use. Disable services and start ups you don't use. Ensure your device drivers are at the optimal version (i usually go mostly subjective on this but by all means run benchmarks.)
Utilize sleep instead of shut down. Especially if you can get S3 or deeper working. I don't suggest hibernate(s5) for a desktop but that's a fair option for a laptop.
If your running your OS off a slow SSD or HDD... I'd really suggest looking into upgrading storage before RAM. Prices there suck, too. But it'll probably be more beneficial.
Prices are theoretically determined by supply and demand: if a lot of people want something, like RAM, then prices tend to do up quickly. On the flip side, if the demand for something falls, like it people no longer want RAM as much as they do now, then prices should, in theory, go down gradually.
I strongly believe that we are in an AI bubble right now, and when it bursts we will see a sharp decline in demand for PC parts, including RAM and SSD storage.
Sadly prices tend to go up like a rocket and fall like a feather. They go up way faster than they come down. Don't expect prices to go back down anytime soon, even if the bubble pops...
To make matters worse, we also have to consider inflation, which essentially represents a decrease in value of the dollar, relative to various things that you can buy with it. Inflation basically means that we all get less for a dollar every year. Some years our dollar gets 2% less valuable, other years it can be much worse. But that is to say that we should expect things to get more expensive over time.
Finally, on a positive note, tech tends to slowly get cheaper over time in the long run as technological improvements make it easier and cheaper to manufacture better technology. As much as 32gb of RAM costs today, having that much ram would have been pretty much unheard of 20 years ago, and probably even more expensive and worse than today.
So yeah, the cost of PC parts sucks right now. We're gonna have to make do with what we have and, if you need to buy something, buy what you can afford.
No, but inflation will eventually go high so the current prices seem cheap.
No. You will have to wait for wages to catch up.
Probably several years, at least. They've already purchased all of the future supply through the rest of this year.
No
No one can say for sure. The answer is likely "no". We're waiting for the AI bubble to burst and some of these AI companies to go broke so their demand collapses. No one knows how long that will take. Likely not soon.