PC gamers just can’t catch a break. After nearly a decade of GPU price instability — from the crypto-mining boom of the mid-2010s to the pandemic-era shortages of 2020 — the graphics card market in 2025 has finally stabilized. GPUs still aren’t cheap, but at least they’re on shelves again. This should be the part of the story where the industry collectively exhales, where every long-suffering gaming household finally gets their hands on an RTX 5080 without mortgaging the dog.

Instead, a new hardware crisis has emerged, and this time it’s targeting one of the most essential components of any PC build: DRAM. 

From $120 to $400 Overnight 

Back in the summer of 2025, a 32GB kit of performance DDR5 could easily be found in the low $100 range. Today, those same kits routinely list for $400 or more. G.Skill’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 (2×16GB) — $124.99 just a few months ago — is now $389.99. Corsair’s similarly spec’d Vengeance DDR5 kit jumped from $134.99 in September to $427.99 by December. 

This isn’t a mild correction or a generational shift. It’s a full-blown price shock.

A Market Controlled by Three Companies 

One reason the spike is so dramatic: the DRAM industry is more consolidated than ever. Just three manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — control the majority of the global DRAM market. SK Hynix leads, followed by Samsung and Micron. No other competitor cracks even 5 percent after the top 3. 

With so few players, any major demand shift creates a global ripple effect. And in 2025, that shift has a very familiar name: AI. 

AI Is Consuming the World’s Memory Supply 

Samsung and SK Hynix, already the two largest DRAM manufacturers on the planet, have reportedly committed nearly 40 percent of the world’s entire memory output to a single customer — OpenAI. As part of the company’s massive Stargate infrastructure project, the Korean giants may end up supplying as many as 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, effectively redirecting a staggering portion of global memory production into AI data centers rather than consumer hardware. 

This unprecedented demand isn’t just an increase — it’s a redirection of the supply pipeline itself. And when hyperscale AI companies buy memory by the wafer, consumer markets are left fighting for whatever remains. 

The NAND Problem: SSD Prices Are Rising Too 

The pain doesn’t stop with DRAM. SSDs, built primarily on NAND flash rather than DRAM, are also seeing upward pressure. The same trio — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — dominate NAND production and are making the same strategic choice: shift output toward AI storage arrays instead of consumer drives. DRAM is tightening, NAND is tightening, and wafer capacity is being consumed faster than new fabs can come online. 

No ASIC Rescue This Time 

During the GPU mining crisis, ASICs eventually took over crypto workloads, easing pressure on consumer GPUs. But no such relief valve exists in the memory world. There is no alternative to DRAM for AI workloads, and no specialized hardware stepping in to free up supply. 

This shortage isn’t self-correcting — at least not quickly.

A New Era of PC Building Fatigue 

For gamers and PC builders, this marks the third major hardware disruption in under a decade. First GPUs, then CPUs and motherboards during the pandemic, and now memory — a component so foundational that every system, from a $600 budget build to a $5,000 workstation, depends on it. 

And with AI demand continuing to surge, there’s no clear timeline for when prices will normalize. 

For now, PC builders may have their pick of GPUs again, but the rest of the system is suddenly more expensive than ever. In the ongoing arms race between AI and consumer computing, it appears that AI has once again taken the lead — and the RAM. 

Sources: Rhino Bitcoin, The Verge