Silver Lining in the Ram Prices

After the surge in GPU prices in the last couple years, it was also expected that RAM and SSD prices would follow. But what wasn’t expected was the hit to be this big, nearly doubling in some cases compared to 2025 for Q1 of 2026. These AI companies are continuously fueling their massive datacenters and as investment comes in,¹ they will not stop.

From the view of the manufacturers, it makes sense. Because they’re not selling DRAMs or NAND chips, they’re selling the big boy chips that AI companies need. Memory used in GPUs are much more profitable compared to what is put into your’s and my phone, tablet, and personal computer. These buyers are consistent, they aren’t like ordinary consumers, they don’t wait for black friday, they don’t wait for any sale; they sign the contracts and just pay full price.

Guaranteed volume, guaranteed profit, zero marketing. The industry has answered these questions loudly.

And thus, we reach the situation that we had in January of this year where three of the largest manufacturers reached their entire production capacity for the year.²

The damage even is seen already, Rasberry Pi having a second price increase in the last months,³ Steam Decks being out of stock “due to memory and storage shortages,”² and increased prices at gaming consoles,² with no obvious end to this. Which is the exact problem with the current shortages. Even though we all want it to pop, this bubble never seems to be decelerating, going down, or even staying constant; always, always increasing.

The Future

The future might be even more bleak than imagined, where hardware is only a service, where you own nothing.² Imagine having your “computer” just be a screen that connects to the cloud where you own nothing.

In this dyst… utopia, nothing ever breaks because nothing is yours, nothing is repairable because nothing is physical, and nothing is private because everything runs somewhere else, on someone else’s computer. The quiet moral, felt when the network briefly stutters and the world freezes, is that keeping old hardware alive was never nostalgia or paranoia, but a small, stubborn act of digital self-defense; A refusal to accept that the future must be rented, permissioned, and revocable at any moment.²

As it is always said, hardware is becoming even more scarce and you should hold on to it ever longer. Companies like Framework are doing amazing work but they are also being affected by the current shortages, having to increase their prices multiple times.

Silver Lining

This is where my optimism comes in place, where we don’t go into the future described above, but instead follow a path where software written for these hardware gets evermore efficient and optimised. Over the last couple decades, the hardware have doubled in power every couple years, making everyone to believe that it wasn’t really important to have good software, which in return had an opposite effect where the software would be considerably less efficient; affectively nullifying what the hardware was achieving. Even so much so that, my programming professor has mentioned that we shouldn’t care about how optimised our code is, and that we should only care about “readability,” which I don’t agree with.

And, maybe, hopefully, with the current shortages, programmers will see that they need to improve the performance of their code, needing to keep up with the demands of the industry… I say this, but more probably than not, the vibe coders will still win, creating awful and awful applications that consume hundreds of times more RAM, SSD, CPU, etc. than if it were written by hand. Still, I think there is a good direction that this might go towards.

Death to OOP! Long live data-oriented design!