RAM prices are finally dropping, but I wouldn’t celebrate just yet

Remember last week when I said I’m starting to see the cracks in the RAM price crisis? Well after months of devastating price hikes, the costs are starting to fall. Trendforce reports that U.S. DDR5 RAM prices have dropped by over 20% in the last month — with similar reductions being seen across the world.

So what’s causing it? Is this the beginning of the end of a drought in consumer computing? And where do they go from here? The answer is tricky with some unknowns, and while I wouldn’t pop the champagne just yet, there is a cause for cautious optimism.

Why have prices gone down?

Across the U.S., China and Europe, DDR5 RAM prices fell sharply. For example, after reaching an all-time high of $500, Corsair’s Vengeance 32GB kit is now down to $369 on Amazon. Memory has fallen more than 20% from recent peak prices, and stock prices of major memory factories like Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix have seen drops of over 20%.

Article continues below

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nowhere near the lowest prices we saw before all this chaos happened, but it’s a start. This seems to have come down to three reasons.

The OpenAI “rug pull”: Of course I’m being dramatic here in calling it a rug pull, but remember when reports showed Sam Altman had signed letters of intent to buy 40% of the global RAM output? Well, turns out those were non-binding, and as OpenAI has pivoted away from its ambitious plans to become leaner, this has impacted memory stock prices.
The TurboQuant difference: Google’s recently announced TurboQuant is able to compress AI’s working memory by at least 6x and make it 8x faster. That dramatically eases the pressure on DRAM requirements, and AI companies may not need as much as previously forecasted.
People don’t want to pay absurd prices: This is the most obvious. Sometimes it takes people voting with their wallets, and with new capacity from smaller manufacturers coming into play for consumer computing, you’re starting to see companies react.

So it’s a bit of a pincer maneuver — consumers aren’t buying at the stratospheric prices, and when AI data centers were supposed to make up the difference, they’re not buying as much either. That’s what has caused this panic.

What happens next?

So allow me to update some of my predictions about what will happen over the next few months, now those cracks in the crisis are starting to widen. In my mind there are two scenarios:

The optimistic scenario: Consumer Goldilocks

TurboQuant has shown that software optimizations can break the hardware barrier of AI. That further reduces DRAM demands, and causes a race to the bottom in consumer DDR5 kits where we could start to reach the pricing floor we saw before this crisis. Throw in Microsoft’s commitment to making Windows 11 more efficient, and you could see a perfect storm of better software streamlining and a memory balloon that becomes a bit of a fire sale by the end of the year.

The pessimistic scenario: Increasing scarcity

Memory manufacturers have been burnt by this, and the red button they can push is to aggressively cut production and starve the market. That would hit retailers hard who refuse to sell at a loss and end in what I’m calling phantom pricing — MSRPs may look better, but stock availability will keep costs high.

Of course, I’m setting up a prayer circle to go down the optimistic road here. I hate that we’re in this situation to begin with. But in terms of knowing when we’ll start to see the signs of an endgame here, my advice still stands.

Hold until August 2026. We’re now in a pricing standoff. Retailers have shown that these can be discounted to clear stock, and the way we get those prices to go down is to wait for further drops and for that AI inflation to evaporate.

Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.