Good news, PC RAM prices are finally dropping

Over the past few months, prices for flash memory products like SSDs and RAM have increased exponentially. Fortunately, the trend is now partially reversing: the prices of DDR4 and DDR5 PC RAM are starting to fall.

Flash memory costs have soared in recent months, in part due to manufacturers’ attempts to meet demand for industrial data centers, many of which are being built or expanded to handle generative AI workloads. Tariffs imposed by the United States and the war in the Middle East are also disrupting global trade. As a result, everything from Raspberry Pi boards to PlayStation consoles to new cars have increased in price.

The good news is that RAM prices are slightly decreasing. For example, Corsair’s Vengeance 32GB DDR4 kit now costs $220 on Amazon, up from $263 in February (see Keepa’s chart below). A 32GB DDR5 pack from Crucial now costs $353 on Amazon, up from around $380 in March. Silicon Power’s 32GB DDR4 kit costs $210, down from $240 in February.

Credit: Keepa

Many other RAM kits remain exorbitantly priced, and even these examples don’t change much. This Corsair Vengeance DDR4 bundle is $43 cheaper than it was a month ago, but it’s not close to the all-time Amazon lowest price of 2025, which was $45. I certainly regret waiting to upgrade my gaming PC – as Andy Bernard once said, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the ‘good old days’, before you leave them.”

There is no sure cause for the drop in prices. OpenAI recently pulled out of a large data center construction project, but that alone wouldn’t change global pricing much, and Microsoft has announced it will take over that facility. Other theories include a drop in future computing demand for AI services, since OpenAI abandoned its video generation application Sora and that Google’s TurboQuant project could significantly optimize AI models. The global economy is complicated.

Unfortunately, the prices of SSDs, hard drives, GPUs, and other PC components haven’t changed much. A 1TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD will still cost you $200 on Amazon – that same drive cost $60 in July 2023. Outside of PC gaming, the PlayStation 5 is about to go to $600, while the PlayStation 5 Pro goes to $900. Maybe that will change in the coming weeks and months, but we’ll have to wait and find out.

Source: The Telegraph via Yahoo Finance