AI Is Hurting Your Next PC Upgrade As RAM Prices Skyrocket 3x In Three Months

So I decided to do something reckless this morning. I decided to look up online for RAM prices.

You know the feeling, right? You're sitting on your desk, with your Chrome browser having 23 tabs open and suddenly your PC starts to stutter as if it's running Cyberpunk 2077 in a Core 2 Duo processor. You think, "Well hey, maybe it's time to upgrade that 16 GB RAM up to 32 GB. That will take care of Google Chrome."

You head over to Amazon or Flipkart, expecting a familiar grid of RGB-laden sticks to pop up.

Except...they aren't there.

I don't mean to say they are expensive (we'll get to that), but they are literally gone. The 6000 MHz CL3 kit I had bookmarked months ago? Vanished. Instead of 'buy again', it shows 'currently unavailable'.

If you look deeper, you'll see items being tagged 'out of stock', 'sold out' and the ones that are available are extremely overpriced.

If you haven't checked prices for PC parts online since August, you might want to sit down. Actually, you might want to crawl down underneath your desk and stay there because the RAM market has officially gone berserk.

Since early September, prices have crept up to the tune of 300% for a stick of RAM. If you want to buy a 16GB stick of Corsair Vengeance, it is going to set you back Rs 9,000. The same product cost Rs 2,800 in July, as per price tracker.

The price hikes aren't restricted to just one company. An Adata 16GB stick, which used to cost Rs 2,700 in July now costs Rs 6,700. A Crucial DDR5 16 GB RAM, which was priced at Rs 3,100 at the start of August, is now listed at Rs 10,000 on Amazon.

Prices are consistently high across all companies, with even a Lexar 32 GB stick of 6400 MT DDR5 costing Rs 23,000 - that's nearly comparable to the price of an Intel i7 12th gen processor, which is listed at Rs 24,500 on Amazon.

If you are looking for someone to blame, it's your friendly neighbourhood Chatbot. Yes, Artificial Intelligence is eating your PC upgrade.

Companies that make memory chips for your gaming rig - Samsung, SK Hynix or Micron - have realised something important. They could sell their standard DDR5 RAM to you, a standard user, or they can retool their entire factory to make High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for Nvidia's AI super-chips and sell it to companies like Microsoft or Google for effectively infinite money.

Guess which one they picked?

As it turns out, training a Large Language Model to write bad poetry requires a staggering amount of memory. So, the manufacturing lines that used to churn out consumer DRAMs are now busy making memory for data centres. And now, the supply chains are all over the place, causing the good old supply vs demand gap.

We spoke to Fissal Oubida, General Manager - India, Middle East, Africa & CIS, Lexar Co., who explained how AI is at the forefront of the ongoing global RAM shortage.

"The rise in AI-based applications in data centres, consumer devices, and enterprise applications has increased the demand for high-performance memory. With AI models becoming larger and more compute-intensive, the availability of DRAM components is becoming more constrained; hence, costs are increasing continuously," he said.

Rajan Arora, a Partner at Forvis Mazars, who is well versed in enterprise technologies and supply chains, says the fragile tech supply chain, coupled with the sudden AI boom, has caught vendors off-guard.

"The recent RAM shortage is really a story about AI colliding with fragile supply chains. AI workloads are memory-hungry, and the sudden spike in RAM demand caught many vendors off guard," he said.

Aside from a crippled supply chain, the AI boom-led RAM shortage has hurt retailers as well as standard PC users.

Retailers have witnessed a significant slowdown in RAM sales, with customers preferring to delay their purchases, while desperate customers are buying RAMs at a premium.

Dinesh Pareek, owner of Aashirwad Computers in Bengaluru's SP Road, says retailers are having to purchase RAMs from distributors at 2-3x the normal price. This has led to a staggering 90% drop in RAM sales.

"If we used to sell 100 units per day, we are selling 10 units now. We are hearing things such as companies selling their RAM units to AI data centres. And this is leading to a pricing bubble, with end user not willing to pay such a premium for RAMs," he said.

Sahil Sardar, a gamer from Kolkata, says he has delayed purchasing a gaming rig due to inflated RAM and SSD prices.

"I can understand paying a higher price for a CPU or a graphics card. But the current prices of RAMs and SSDs seem just silly to me. I will probably wait it out or buy a PS5 if current prices sustain," he said.

This brings us to the big question. Will RAM prices sustain?

"Unlikely," says Rajan Arora. "But higher price volatility and longer lead times are probably the new normal. Planning for that, instead of hoping it disappears, is now part of responsible digital transformation."

Meanwhile, Pratik Bafna, Proprietor of Phoenix Technology NX, a retail electronics store located in Mumbai's Lamington Road, believes things may subside in the next two to three months.

"My optimistic view is that prices will get better in the next two-three months. For now, gamers or standard buyers are holding off on any RAM purchases."

Lexar, for its part, is firmly on track when it comes to navigating supply chain challenges.

"Lexar has remained firmly on track due to our proactive forecasting and strong R&D foundation. We anticipated the rising demand driven by AI, advanced content creation, and high-performance computing much earlier," says Fissal Oubida.

"As we look ahead, our 2026 portfolio is progressing in line with market forecasts. Despite the challenges the industry may be experiencing, Lexar is fully prepared and equipped to meet evolving market needs," he added.

While it remains to be seen whether or not things will improve heading into 2026, it perhaps fair to say that if you’re sitting on 32GB or 64GB of DDR5 right now, congratulations. You are effectively holding a high-yield asset class. You should probably put that RAM in a safe deposit box.

For the rest of us, we’ll just have to close a few Chrome tabs, lower our texture settings, and dream of the days when a RAM upgrade didn’t cost as much as an entry-level graphics card.