Why your next RAM upgrade is going to hurt

I had a look at RAM prices on our site the other week and had to look twice. The same kit that would've been pocket change a year or so ago now costs multiples of that. Turns out I'm not imagining things, memory and storage prices have gone properly haywire in 2026, and it's not a blip.

It's bad. Like, historically bad.

DRAM contract prices jumped 90–95% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026 alone, then piled on another 58–63% in Q2. On a longer scale DRAM is up roughly 172% year-over-year. A 64GB DDR5 kit that you could've picked up for a couple hundred quid is now pushing £1000+, a 5x jump since last year.

Enterprise buyers are also being hit as 64GB DDR5 server memory (RDIMM) is projected to go from about £645 in Q1 to something like £1,175 by the end of the year. That's an 80%+ increase in nine months.

NAND flash (the stuff SSDs are made of) isn't lagging far behind. Consumer 1TB NVMEs have basically tripled since late 2025, going from around £33 to over £100 on popular e-commerce sites. For higher end variants, a Samsung 990 Pro 1TB has gone from around £80 in January to £230 today! At one point Sandisk hiked its NAND contract prices 50% in a single month, which was enough to send smaller module makers like Transcend and Apacer scrambling to pause shipments while they figured out what to charge.

Put it all together and memory now eats up around 35% of what it costs to build a PC, up from maybe 15–18% before. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, and Asus have all warned customers to expect 15–20% higher PC prices this year, and some estimates go as high as 30%. You'll have noticed it if you've browsed Currys or Argos lately — laptop specs have quietly crept down while prices creep up.

So what's actually causing this?

In one line: AI took the memory.

Every AI data centre running training or inference needs enormous amounts of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to feed its GPUs. The three companies that make almost all the world's DRAM (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) have been quietly redirecting fab capacity away from ordinary DDR5 and NAND toward HBM, because that's where Nvidia and the other AI chipmakers are paying premium prices.

This isn't a matter of factories producing less silicon overall, it's the same silicon wafers getting reallocated to whatever pays best. HBM alone is now eating up something like 23% of global DRAM wafer capacity. Some manufacturers have even started converting NAND lines over to DRAM production, chasing the better margins which squeezes NAND supply further. One major NAND manufacturer reportedly had its entire 2026 output pre-sold before the year even got going.

Meanwhile demand for ordinary memory hasn't gone anywhere. IDC estimated DRAM supply would only grow about 16% year-over-year in 2026, and NAND just 17%, nowhere near enough to cover normal demand once AI has taken its cut. The scale of that AI demand is genuinely wild with Microsoft, Google, and Meta combined being on track to spend something like £480 billion in capex this year. To put that into perspective a single AI server can chew through as much memory as dozens, sometimes hundreds, of ordinary laptops.

The consensus among analysts at this point is that this isn't a normal boom-bust cycle that self-corrects in a year or two — it's a structural shift in where memory capacity goes, and prices are expected to stay elevated well into 2027. Dell's own COO said on an investor call that he'd never seen costs climb this fast, which tells you something given how long that guy's been involved in the supply chain.

When does it get better?

Not soon, unfortunately. There's some expectation that the pace of increases eases up a bit in the second half of 2026, mostly because buyers are starting to push back at these prices, but that just means things get worse more slowly, not that they get better. Most people tracking this closely aren't expecting real relief before mid-2027 at the earliest.

New fab capacity is the actual fix, and that's years out. Samsung's new P5 fab, which is supposed to produce HBM, DRAM, and NAND, isn't targeting mass production until the second half of 2028.

What to actually do about it

If you're building or buying in the UK:

• Buying a laptop or desktop soon? Prices are only going up from here, and don't be shocked if the base config from Currys, John Lewis, or Argos quietly has less RAM or storage than the same model did last year.

• Been putting off a RAM or SSD upgrade? This is about as cheap as it's going to get for a while. Check online retailers before deciding to wait, prices there move fast, and waiting will probably cost you more, not less.

• Planning IT budgets? Throw out anything based on 2023 or 2024 component pricing — it's not coming back. Treat memory as a volatile cost line for the next couple of budget cycles, not a fixed one.

The blunt version of all this is the AI boom needs a staggering amount of memory, and the rest of us are the ones footing part of that bill.

Figures above reflect industry reporting through Q3 2026, converted to GBP at roughly £0.74 to the dollar, and will keep moving as the market shifts.