“It’s a perfect storm of unpreparedness, panic, and greed” – RAM prices are soaring, so what does it mean for gaming?

The price of RAM, the quick access source of memory in a computer, is currently soaring. Prices have more than doubled in two months and show no sign of slowing down. They’ve risen so sharply, in fact, that some shops have stopped printing price labels so they can alter the prices daily, as though they were market traders selling freshly caught fish.

This problem is likely to affect us all in gaming – it isn’t only a PC gaming issue. Yes, obviously it will be more expensive to build and upgrade a PC, but the rise in prices also causes problems for Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine as it enters full production. Consoles aren’t safe either; there’s already talk of Microsoft raising Xbox prices in response, and even companies with large RAM stockpiles won’t be safe forever.

What’s more, the component crunch isn’t an isolated issue. RAM is the acute problem right now but SSD storage prices are on the rise, and graphics card prices, though more stable than they have been in previous years, remain high. These are all connected things. And if the prices continue to rise, they may push gaming beyond the reach of many people’s expendable incomes.

Why is this happening?

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There are a few reasons, but the biggest current driver of change is everyone’s favourite technological development, AI. Tech companies need RAM to power their AI platforms, so as these platforms continue to grow, so does the demand for RAM.

The price of RAM has been increasing since the spring, but it was turbocharged at the start of October when colossal AI company OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, announced a deal with two of the world’s largest producers of memory chips – Samsung and SK hynix. This deal will see Samsung and SK hynix provide memory to OpenAI for its huge Stargate data center initiative, which will effectively result in OpenAI commandeering 40 percent of the world’s RAM output. The response? Panic buying, as companies rushed to fill their RAM reserves, which only drove prices higher.

It didn’t help that RAM manufacturers generally had smaller reserves to begin with because they’d produced a surplus during Covid when demand was higher, as people transitioned to working at home. Recent tariff ridiculousness – mostly between the US and China – also made matters worse, disrupting supply lines and undermining confidence as companies waited to see what would happen next. As respected tech reporter Moore’s Law is Dead said in a video: “It’s a perfect storm of unpreparedness, panic, and greed.”

What does this mean for gaming?

On a surface level it means buying RAM for a PC will be more expensive. The newer generation DDR5 RAM is particularly expensive. Our tech reporter Will Judd tells me the 32GB DDR5 RAM he uses to test most of his builds increased from £88 to £222. At the higher end of speedy 64GB DDR5 RAM, you can find prices as high as £735 (up from £228!) making it more expensive than a PS5 Pro, especially at its current discounted rate. The knock-on effect is companies that make gaming devices that use RAM, which is pretty much all of them, have to put their prices up to compensate. Case in point: PC-builder CyberPowerPC did exactly this yesterday, warning of a price increase in December because of “market conditions”.

How much a company will be affected depends on how large their RAM reserves are – their stockpile, which presumably they bought at a cheaper price. As Moore’s Law is Dead said, Sony seems to be well stocked, hence the company’s ability to drop the price of PlayStation 5 for Black Friday and to introduce a cheaper PlayStation 5 model exclusively for Japan, which has apparently quadrupled sales in the region.

Nintendo is also suspected to be well stocked, having presumably bulked RAM reserves ahead of the Switch 2 launch this year. But Microsoft is rumoured to have low levels of stockpiled RAM, so may feel the sting of rising prices soonest as it goes out to buy more. Will that then be absorbed by Microsoft as it tries to keep Xbox prices down, or will it be born out in the end-user price?

There’s a question mark over Valve and its approaching Steam Machine. Valve will not subsidise the cost of the machine as console manufacturers typically do in an effort to establish an installed base to sell games to, meaning the Steam Machine will much more closely reflect the price of the individual components. Valve presumably has a big enough stockpile for an initial production run, but how soon will it need more RAM that it will pay exorbitant prices for? Is this enough of a problem that it may delay the release of the Steam Machine?

How long will this last?

Given that AI demand is the driving force behind these inflated RAM prices, those prices will presumably remain high as long as tech companies invest heavily in AI, which they are currently doing. That’s where the big money is so that’s why everyone wants a piece of it. But there is talk of AI being a bubble that might burst, although whether or not that will bear-out, or when, is of course unknown.

It’s also worth noting that exacerbating factors such as tariffs and the general cost of living continue to burden the market. They are the reasons we’ve seen unprecedented price rises across this generation of consoles, after all – this is the first generation in memory where the price of consoles has actually gone up since launch. We’re much more used to seeing prices and sizes of consoles shrink alongside the components in them, though this is harder to achieve now than it used to be.

Just as it took many things to drive the prices up, it will take many things to bring them back down again. That’s also assuming, of course, memory manufacturers will want to aid that. As it stands, they’re making a lot of money from this, because large tech companies have a lot of money to throw around. AI and crypto mining have driven huge profits for companies which make components you need for them. Take Nvidia as an example: its share price has erupted like a volcano in the past five years, making it the most valuable company in the world today. Why would a company that’s benefiting enormously from scarcity, coupled with high demand, seek to change that?

Could this affect next-gen consoles?

That’s the bigger question, because why try and launch a new console and establish an installed base for it if you’re looking at prices most people will struggle to be able to afford? The only way to achieve lower prices would be to subsidise the machines heavily and take a financial hit, but why do that if you are Sony or Nintendo, whose consoles are both selling at record rates? Microsoft arguably has the biggest incentive because it has ground to gain, but we’ve already seen the company step back from the either-or approach to consoles and start publishing Xbox games on PlayStation instead; hardware dominance doesn’t seem as important to Xbox any more.

It would make more sense for a company like Sony, which is in a dominant position with PlayStation 5, to simply wait. To extend this generation of gaming even further, and continue selling and developing for PlayStation 5, all while waiting for the component market to settle down, assuming it ever does. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Late-generation development has historically resulted in some wonderful games, because dev tools and engines and processes are well established at that point, and because there is a larger installed base to sell to. Less dev upheaval plus greater potential rewards is a convincing argument.

The rising price of RAM is about much more than the rising price of RAM, then. It’s about strangleholds and monopolies and individuals being overlooked as hungry tech companies stampede towards AI dominance. It’s also yet another disruption in a generation of gaming that is undergoing seismic, fundamental changes. “The role of the console is shifting,” I heard from experts recently, and this is perhaps one more shove on its way.