RAM Prices Are Up 500% in 12 Months. Micron Just Said It Gets Worse.

Prices for 32GB DDR5 RAM have skyrocketed 500% in just one year, jumping from $72 to $392. Even a 128GB kit, once priced at $329, now costs $3,399. This isn't just a temporary hike; companies producing memory have explained that this new baseline is here to stay. The information comes from Micron's Q4 2026 earnings call, Samsung's statements, and price data from Tom's Hardware and PCPartPicker.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra warned that the supply-demand imbalance will only worsen in 2027 and 2028, with 75% of Micron's production capacity booked for next year. Memory prices for 2027 deliveries are significantly higher than those for 2026. The core issue lies in the shift of manufacturing capacity from consumer-grade DDR5 memory to AI data centers.

High-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI accelerators consumes three times the wafer capacity per bit compared to standard DRAM, leaving fewer bits for consumer-grade DDR5. As HBM nodes transition, the cost per bit increases, making consumer memory an afterthought. Micron's Crucial brand, which catered to PC builders for decades, stopped selling directly to consumers in favor of larger customers in faster-growing segments.

Reports suggest AI data centers could consume nearly 70% of global memory supply by the end of 2026, leaving limited memory for other applications. The shortage has affected prices of smartphones, streaming devices, and gaming consoles. While Micron plans $25 billion in capex for the next half of its fiscal year and new factories coming online in 2028, CEO Mehrotra admits that production ramps gradually, and the company can only meet half to two-thirds of demand.

For consumers looking to buy hardware in the next six months, the advice is to prioritize buying RAM before other components, as it has the worst price trajectory and will likely remain expensive.