Memory prices are insane, and it’s not just hurting consumers — PC makers have to deal with this crap, too. According to HP’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, the company is now spending approximately 35 percent of its PC bill of materials (that is, the price of all the parts in a computer) on RAM and storage. That’s about double what it was last year, 15-18 percent.
That’s nowhere near the triple and quadruple prices consumers are seeing for RAM purchased at retail, but the math is different for HP, which gets its hardware much closer to the source. Even so, if the company sees “memory costs increase roughly 100% of sequentially,” according to CFO Karen Parkhill, it’s going to make a lot of other numbers go up in a bad way.
While manufacturers like HP, Dell, and Asus are making money off of the “AI” boom by selling hardware to data centers, they’re also a lot more dependent upon regular consumers buying laptops and desktops. So they feel the pain of the market much more than the folks selling shovels in the gold rush — Nvidia, Micron, Samsung, et cetera. Reports indicate that regular PC manufacturers are scrambling for sources of less expensive memory, like looking into formerly regional memory producers in China.
There are indications that the industry is, if not recovering, then at least leveling off. Some markets like Germany are finally seeing RAM prices start to go down from their stratospheric highs. This is estimated to be a correction not from the lack of supply itself, but from the increase in prices caused by “panic buying,” a trend observed in the general PC market. I don’t have enough data to make a call either way, but prices going down somewhere is encouraging.
Prices for general PCs and other consumer tech that’s heavily reliant upon memory are expected to go up 20 percent across the board. The RAM crisis is predicted to go on for multiple years, unless the “AI” bubble pops.
