RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices

I swear there's a new gold rush every time I want to upgrade my pc.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if the previous gold rush ended first, but they seem to just be stacking up.
- Speak for your self - scored a nice GPU upgrade during the crypto crash, maybe something similar will be achievable after this insanity hits the brakes.
- This AI bubble needs to explode yesterday, Wall Street be damned.
- There was a nice window from about a year or two ago to about 3 months ago where no individual components were noticably inflated. Monitors took the longest to recover since the pandemic shortages so that was arguably around the beginning of this year that they seemed to fully normalize
  Its funny because at work we've been pushing hard on Windows 11 refreshes all year and warning that there will likely be a rush of folks refreshing at the last possible minute at the end of the year inflating prices. And we ended up being correct on the inflated prices part but it was actually the AI bubble that did it
- That's the tariffs, now. GPUs had come down a bit before the dumbass
This is why I'm still running ddr4. Every time I think about upgrading a generation, there's a run on some integral component.
- AM4 is gonna last until the 2030s at this rate...
- DDR4 is expensive as shit too now. I was trying to build out a new rack for my homelab and 256GB of ram went from like $300 6 months ago to $1500.
- Did I tell you about using arch?
It’s why I started treating computers as commodities — I rarely upgrade anymore; just wait the 5 years and by an entirely new system.
- Same except for me it's 10 years.
because we're in an era where there always will be a gold rush for a specific component. upgrades have slowed down considerably in the past 10 years, my laptop is 4 years old and still kicks like the first day, I still game on my 8 year old laptop which is permanently attached to the TV and running as a steam machine with more than decent performance.
this wasn't even thinkable in the 00's
I'm pretty sure after hard disks, GPUs, rams the next shortage is either Arm CPUs or a specific future type of PSUs
I feel like the luckiest person because I built my last PC right before the crypto hype and my current one right before the AI bubble.
So it's your fault...

First they came for the hard drives, and I did not speak out because I didn't need a hard drive. Then they came for the GPUs and I did not speak out because I had a pretty dope GPU. Then they came for my 8gb of ram and there was nobody left to speak out for me.

I have 128gb of corsair ddr5 in my closet. IM RICH!

Just did a quick check, it's worth double what I paid for it. I'll just let it sit in my closet until it's worthless.

I also have 128gb of ddr5 ram
And 64gb of ddr5 ram
And some laptop ddr5 ram
I'm going to wrap them all in Saran Wrap and stick them up my ass so my brain works faster
- Ah, but you see, if you wrap it in Saran wrap, they won't be able to make contact. You'd be better off using contact grease for that easy insertion
- brAIn power.
Is it sitting on top of a pile of beanie babies?
If it’s new it genuinely might be worth 2k. Looked at the prices yesterday and corsair had 64gb for ~1k.

Lol pricing computer parts like they do fish in an expensive restaurant.

What a time to be alive.

Thing is, this isn't new in the slightest.
I remember calling around to different PC stores in the 90s and early 00s to find the cheapest RAM and hard drive prices.
Before that, I remember my grandfather, an IBM employee in the 60s-90s calling places looking for best pricing on 64k-128k SIPP memory for an ibm pizzabox 286.
- That was the norm before it was so easy to buy online from across the country, local stores set their own prices and a few minutes of calling to find the best deal is like searching on Google for a few minutes to find the best deal... But they weren't doubling in price in a couple months, that I can recall anyway.
- I'll never forget the time someone in my neighborhood found out one of the local PC shops had a deal on 8MB of RAM for like 100 bucks. That's not a typo kiddies 8 Megabytes. We were so excited, a bunch of us piled into one car and rushed over there before they sold out!
- Yeah the "shopping around" aspect isn't even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.
  Today the situation is flipped. It isn't difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you'll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.
  The problem is that right now the "good" prices are crazy.
EDIT: Snapper RAM for the man!
In paris there was this street "rue Montgallet" selling computer stuff like that around y2000, the prices for the most sold things were printed on a cheap paper daily or you had to ask. Guarantee? Yes, but it stops when you leave the shop, or so was the saying.

If you want to see a good set of graphs on pricing over time, PC Parts Picker does some good ones. It's absolutely INSANE how bad it's getting. The graphs in question.

Here's some that's significantly cheaper than the graph would suggest: https://www.amazon.com/G-SKILL-Trident-64GB-SDRAM-Memory/dp/B0BSB94VC2
Not that it's a good price in general or anything, but if you absolutely must buy now...
- Currently unavailable.
  Well that didnt last long at all!

For real. I've been building a completely brand new computer for my husband for a couple months now. Buying a new piece each paycheck, then I get paid this week and I discover I can't buy the RAM... It's fucking half way finished and the only 2 parts left to buy is GPU and RAM.
- Unfortunately those are the most expensive parts right now because they both require memory chips. Perhaps consider buying used, might be tough to find DDR5 DIMMs but used GPUs are plentiful.

As someone buying load of secondhand tech, you don't need the latest and greatest

Yeah but even second hand drives are stupid-priced today. No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
I can't wait for this to pop, I mean if it does in a way that produces selloffs.
- No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
  well damn that's a steal. I'd buy it.
- A friend of mine lives in Egypt and that would be a steal
I can never get people to understand this. I've got servers running on i7 8th gens, with stock 16GB ram. I could upgrade, but no need. People thinking they need 128GB to plays games are delusional.
- To run games, you might need at least 32Gb. 64 Gb is sufficient in most cases. Still expensive af
My husband and I have been using computers we built 15 years ago and we decided this year we'll finally build new computers... Lmao sucks to be us :( already built mine, his is almost done but missing a key component... RAM lmaooooo
- Just get the least necessary and hope that prices will drop :(

Lived in the Silicon Valley in the 1990's, when the price of RAM exploded with the web, armed robberies of manufacturing plants and warehouses for RAM became a thing for a few years.

Insert <Aw shit, here we go again . meme>

I think the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).
- Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world's DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren't aware they were both signing up for it.
  That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn't an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.
  https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
But now the surveillance capabilities of both the state and large corporations have been ramped up to infinity and beyond. I'm expecting a partnership announcement between Micron and Raytheon any day now, where Raytheon gets free DDR5 and Micron gets armed and autonomous security drones.
Kind of \s, kind of not

This is crazy, not displaying the price of an item in a shelf or display is against consumer laws where I live. And if the price on display is not updated the store is required to sell by the price on display.

It's blatant price-gouging. Any stock in the store has already been sold to them at an agreed price. They can set a number and make their set margin.
Updating prices after each delivery might make sense (if their procurement department is absolute dogshit at negotiating contracts), but updating prices throughout the day is just someone trying to see how hard they can push their margins to drain every cent out of their customers.
That's probably one of those toothless laws that can be easily bypassed on a technicality. Like, just say the shelf is for "storage" and not "display".
- Some places try to argue something like that, but if you push back a little they cave. The law estipulates a fine ranging from 74 to 1 000 000 USD for visible products in shelves or display without a visible price tag. And since its a fine, the government is eager to get his piece of the pie.
  (Edit for misspelling)
So with things like fish that can change day to day are they required to just update it every day? that sounds nice.
- @kieron115
  Yes, otherwise how would buyers know the price?
  @kurodriel

That's crap. They've loaded their stock on a certain price and they want to surf the high wave while they can.

They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I've worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I've never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it's going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I'm selling you now.
I don't have any insider insight into other companies' operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.
I think what we're seeing is the result of their stock depleting actually. AI has been buying up supply for a while, and I don't think the consumer markets are able to compete.
That's Free Markets, baby!

That's insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
- yep. i took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc, knowing this ai shit along with the tariffs was going to make prices bonkers af, and i needed an upgrade anyway. 8% interest on a couple grand personal loan is better than paying 4x the price in cash
Love Keepa!
- Isn't this the new first party price chart Amazon is testing out?
That's almost a quarter of minimum wage

Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.

Someone should tell them about those e-paper price tags...

How else they gonna bait you to buy?
- Huh?

It’s not a fucking lobster. Base pricing per unit based on whatever profit margin you need on that item.

Nope, let’s get as much as we can at all times, like it’s silver bullion.

No, they have to base the price on what it costs to order the next shipment, unless they want to just stop carrying ram or you expect them to take on a loan for that. The wholesale market for ram must be fucking wild for a retail store to think they have to post something like that.

Im still running off DDR3

and feelin fine

This bubble cannot burst soon enough

It can't pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.
The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn't pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they're doing.
We're increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government's leadership believes they need to maintain the illusion of control over the public.

If this bubble doesn't pop soon, I expect a memory card thefts to start making the headlines. Small and easier to carry off while being more expensive than some jewelry of the same size.

I think that in the long run, the RAM shortage will turn into a glut of much faster and larger DDR5 RAM sticks. Provided if you can wait for the transition to AM6, an AM5 endgame system will have pretty good RAM.

They are going to pivot all that processing to the next snale oil scheme. Do you think its a coincidence that rhe AI hype came immediately after crypto crashed?
- I view AI to be like the printing press: It is good for the everyman...if that everyman was willing to own and make use of it. By ceding AI to oligarchs, society would be allowing the 1% to have more tools to do stuff, while denying the public from making effective use of them.
  The answer isn't to reject AI, but to fund publicly developed and owned AI. Every minority who has 95% of Disney's legal acumen in their pocket, will be able to more effectively resist Kavenaugh Stops in court. An AI can scour the web and spot discounted goods that a person actually wants, and create a shopping list that is cheap and convenient. People can have a competent teacher, if their rural household lacks a school. All these things lend a little extra agency to ordinary people.
  My point, is that we shouldn't refuse tools. Instead, we should adopt them on OUR terms, not the techbro's.

Well if you know of a better way to generate pictures of comically obese bearded men gayly dancing, I'd love to hear it.

DMing you my patron

You don't hate AI slop enough...

Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, "I'm only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It's DDR4, can't be that expensive".

Yeah... It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.

Even in 2025, emerging industries are like "what's an environment?"

Can't blame this on not knowing. It's all just negligence and evil now.

(I know it's not the point, but a reminder that data center climate impact, including heat, is nowhere near flight, agricultural waste, or construction. Hate it for its own reasons, not for fake ones.)

Hi I can explain the difference. The three other things you listed are necessary for a multitude of reasons. The current boom in data centers is for a solution in search of a problem wasting shit for no gain to humanity as a whole.
Hope that helps :3
- Also the scariest part of this datacenter inflation is how much of these new data centers are going to be abandoned within the next 5 years when the AI bubble pops and suddenly the companies spending like crazy on datacenter growth need to cut back. There'll be lots of big empty buildings outside of small towns costing taxpayers a ton of money, much like when any big box store closes up shop. You can either spend a ton of money tearing it down, a ton of money rebuilding it into something useful, a ton of money attracting another business which may or may not front the cost for remodeling the space or a ton of money maintaining the empty property so it doesn't fall over and become even more of a blight. There's no winning for these small municipalities that just get used and abused by large businesses
- Growing inefficient cattle crops in a desert to preserve water rights: not necessary.
  Flying Coast to coast for a business meeting that could be an email: not necessary.
  Manufacturing those cheap scissors that break after 2 uses: should be a crime (not necessary).
  All of these subcases have comparable emissions and externalities to the data centers (at least by my fermi estimates).
Yeah, but the average Lemme/Redditor is not going to waste an opportunity to pretend caring, pointing his/her finger and accumulate fake internet points.
- I do feel obligated to at least expose folks to numeracy, even if they won't listen. Hope it's not giving them a repeated trauma somehow.
It's easier to bitch about the woes of a thing I already don't like than to have to make any effort in changing my habits, mmkay?

I was told I was probably overdoing it putting 96GB in my PC a year or two ago. Be that true, but if this pricing doesn't ease up by the time it becomes a server, my ZFS cache will love it!

The 64GB kit I purchased Aug 2024 for $195 is now listing for $540

This is nothing new. I worked at a small computer shop in a small town between 2005-2007. The owner treated memory as a commodity. He checked national ram module prices daily. Buying low, and selling high. He sometimes adjusted the module price on a per-customer basis.

I get that it's much harder to do that with online stores, where prices are published to multiple places, and for chain stores where the price needs to be consistent between locations.

Bitch, are you surge pricing ram? Cuz it looks like you're surge pricing ram....

I wonder how long ill be staying on my AM4 motherboard... those updated CPUs for gaming that AMD came out with might be my only option for a long time.

hmm I got 2 8bg ddr4 sticks, anyone wanna make an offer?

$3.50
- Dammit monster! Get off my lawn! I ain't giving you no tree-fitty!
Huh, you got 2 sticks of RAM? That's some next level gaming rig you got there. What do they cost ya?

I swear I bought some RAM just at the start of October for reasonable prices. Did it change so quickly?

Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssss.

What market are you shopping at?!

I only use Alaska King RAM.

I LOVE FREE MARKETS!

I LOVE FREE MARKETS SO MUCH!

RAM is not really expensive. You get enough RAM for most tasks the use of which you can understand, as a fraction of the normal amount for any machine.

You can load a can't stress how good planetary map into RAM wholly, without paging it.

Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.

That there's much demand from some other side - oh yes.

BTW, I just got a thought that this might be aimed at hurting China and East Asia in general, when the bubble pops, in the west it'll be just investors losing what they deserve to lose, but in East Asia it'll be actual production rebuilt for the bubble dying in pains.

What? You might want to proof read that. The only thing I got from your text is that text editors load an entire file into memory, which has been the case for decades unless you go with a special purpose editor.
- Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.
  been the case for decades
  One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you're using the vlf package or similar.
  TECO and ed might not. Dunno.
- The only thing I got from your text is that text editors load an entire file into memory, which has been the case for decades unless you go with a special purpose editor.
  Holy crap, and these people think they have right to talk about computers.
  You can have a 12G text file, logs, suppose, you are going to load the entire file into memory? And you think it's normal?
  You might want to proof read that.
  I think you might want to put more effort into reading. This seems to be your weak side.

Can't wait for the AI bubble to burst and we can all buy RAM at auction for $2 plus a 28% buyers premium.

Another user in the BlueSky thread showed a photo that appears to be a Best Buy case of RAM, showing a 32GB set of two DDR5 DIMMs going for over $400 USD, a 64GB kit for over $900.

If I hit Google Shopping, which indexes a ton of retailer sites, I can find 2x16GB DDR5 DIMMs for far less than that at various retailers that haven't jacked up prices yet.

https://www.google.com/shopping?udm=28

My first hit for "2x16gb 32gb ddr5" sorted by price is this:

https://pcpartshawaii.com/products/kingston-fury-ddr5-32gb-2x16gb-5200mhz-cl40-ram

Kingston Fury DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) 5600MHz CL40 RAM KF556C40BBK2-32
$100.00

They say that they have two in stock.

These guys are next lowest:

https://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/kingston/part-kcp548us8k2-32.htm

Price: $103.06

Who goes to best buy for ram? Like the physical store... Everything small is marked up anyways.
- And what's not marked up is sold out. Fuck that place.

You can get 32gb of ram in the UK for the equivalent of $130....

You guys are being ripped off

I can see ddr4 at that price not ddr5

There should be laws capping how much of something you can sell to a single greedy person/purpose. It's common fucking sense.

Sure. Not for RAM, though. It ain't water, friend.