Why the RAM price crisis isn't ending

Posted on: Tuesday, November 25, 2025 at 01:10PM

The RAM price crisis is not ending any time soon. And there’s a good reason why. And no, it’s not just natural demand.

The Motive

For a long time big data companies like the then IBM and the now, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon; have pushed to make people dependent on infrastructure. Infrastructure that they can charge a subscription for access to it.

All previous attempts to do so were thwarted by how slow and unreliable the internet was at those times.

So this pushed consumer computing to where it is now.

The Game

So when consumer computing has gotten as far as it is now, what’s the best way to force it to backtrack to get people more dependent on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

Artificial market manipulation is how. It’s how diamond jewelry manufacturers have made bank for as long as they did and it could be how IaaS companies can make bank well into the future.

AI is just a paradigm shift that will be used to ensure this market manipulation into the future.

Because if the AI bubble does pop (big if) these datacenters will just be repurposed into some other service.

Why the market manipulation is artificial

The reason why I believe that the market manipulation is artificial is because I have seen data center expansions up close back when I subcontracted.

Typically expansions take two years to bring online and completely new datacenters take up to six years to bring online.

And the servers or components aren’t purchased until the latest 6 months to ensure the components are up do date as possible (especially for bleeding edge uses like AI).

With just one deal buying up 40% of the entire market, the purchasing seems to be outpacing the construction, by a lot.

Just think about that for one moment. The last time an entity bought up that much of a market, it was an EV dealer and those EV’s sat on the lot and rotted. And the deal still suited them well as it maintained the prices of EV’s as the market waned, due to the supply shortage that ensued.

Biggest competitor

To this day the biggest competitor to AI infrastructure providers, is client-side AI models. As client-side AI tech does contribute some to the AI models that the infrastructure uses, they won’t and can’t shut that down directly.

So the next best way to shut it down is to effectively price people out of being able to buy capable hardware.

This is the same as those seeking to control guns buy cutting off ammunition supplies to civilians.

The end

Eventually the demand problem may be sorted out once AI models start becoming more efficient and such. But then as demand wanes, so may DRAM production, which will keep prices high to a certain point.

And you can expect most RAM kits to be $300+ after that. The market is not ever going to recover. I hate to destroy hopes here but this is my prediction.