TLDR: There is a shortage of both RAM and SSDs world wide simply because the amount of RAM and SSDs being used for AI centers. Pricing is up approximately 100% in the last two months, and it will continue to get worse for well into 2026.
Once again we are amidst another custom PC hardware issue, in the past we have had hard drive shortages caused by a flood in 1 of the 2 major hard drive manufacturers, RAM fixed pricing scandals and not so long ago GPU shortages because of crypto mining. Historically these are things that cause a global issue and are not only out of our control but pretty much anyone else in the industry too. For many of you reading this, you probably do not care but we want to make customers aware of what is going on so they can make informed decisions when it comes to the purchase of pretty much any PC on the planet including our award winning 6 year warranty carrying artisan creations. With any supply and demand issue the ultimate result result is that end users prices simply go up. With both the issue evident it is not going away for the forceable future and customers now starting to notice a recent price hike we feel its only fair to make an announcement.
RAM
Very generally speaking PC component pricing tends to decrease over time as newer faster tech comes out as a result of manufacturers striving to go faster so to speak, older tech then simply has to be cheaper to compete until that manufacturer catches up with their latest and greatest and that original component then becomes end of life and is no longer made/available. It is a never ending cycle and tends to apply to most tech related products.
The above graph is the pricing history of a the very popular 32GB Corsair Vengeance 6000Mhz DDR5 (2x16GB) Kit from a popular online retailer, whilst we do not buy our stock from online retailers (it comes from distributors who can provide volume and therefore cheaper prices) that online retailer will be buying their stock from the same place as us. As you can see, it goes back just over 3 years and you can see, right up until September/October this year, the trend of prices slowly going down over time applies. However, you can probably also see that the price has skyrocketed from £99.99 in September to £190.99 in less than 2 months.
We face price prices changes from our suppliers on a daily bases, usually because of exchange rate changes, tariffs or new competing products, this is never an issue as all component prices fluctuate up as well as down tend to iron themselves either out after a week or two, and even then we are talking small single digit percentile changes, in our example we can see a whopping 91% bump in just 7 weeks. That's a £90 price rise to every system we sell with 32GB of Corsair Vengeance for essentially no reason that realistically impacts both you or us.
Well, we say no reason, ultimately the world has gone mad for AI, love it or hate it, its very much so here and pretty much all of the gigantic tech companies are literally throwing billions on developing the best AI has to offer. Mark Zuckerberg just 6 weeks ago, said he's prepared to "misspend a couple hundred billion dollars" to avoid losing the AI race. To us fish & chip loving nation $200,000,000,000 is exactly £152,241,970,000 at the time of writing.
Many of us begrudge "misspending" an extra quid on a can of coke let alone alone a number where we have to count the digits carefully before hitting the publish button so you can see what kind of silly scale this AI hype train has.
AI power essentially equates to how much processing power you throw at it, specifically Graphical Processing Unit power (GPUs) which are found in Nvidia and AMD graphics cards and whilst RAM and SSDs are not GPUs the GPUs need RAM and SSD storage in order to function - they are still essentially complete computers that need to use all of the same components that make up a "normal" or "gaming PC". Without RAM and SSDs the GPUs will not function as intended so demand has shot up inline with all these gigantic billion dollar "AI data centers" currently being built globally.
Lets look at a couple of other examples, this time with a 64GB kit of the same brand and speed DDR5 RAM, as well as older 32GB DDR4 RAM;
Since September we have gone from £195.43 to £414.98, a 112% jump in just 10 weeks!
Generally speaking this is an issue with DDR5 RAM, however DDR4 pricing has also been creeping up;
DDR4 initially crept up due to lower supply numbers, the latest and greatest is of course DDR5 RAM but DDR4 has become very cheap over the last couple of years making it still a viable value for money solution for some, but AI data centers can utilise still very much so relevant DDR4 RAM with hardly any degradation to the AI compute power and as a result DDR4 RAM is also being taken along for the ride.
SSDs
Unfortunately, SSDs are basically non volatile RAM chips that instead of wiping when you turn off your computer like RAM does, it retains the information hence why you and you system saves things here.
As they are made of the same thing, price rises on the storage market are also seeing these bumps although thankfully not as hard but given SSDs and RAM follow a close trend we have no doubt it will get worse;
Up 15% in 3 months. Whilst this is nothing too major just yet, its still a few quid more for the same product but importantly shows the RAM and SSD correlation leading us to only one conclusion, its only going to go one way.
The Solution
There isn't one. This only stops when one of two things happen:
The AI bubble bursts - we cant see this happening anytime soon if at all.
Manufacturers ramp up production - This is probably going to be the solution. More RAM available means lower pricing however this will time, you cant just push a button and double your output, you need to build a bigger factory potentially taking years plus its an area of the industry that was rocked by price fixing back in 2018. If said manufacturers got on with ramping things up honestly and efficiently we should see the effects completely reversed in a couple of months - approximately the amount of time the issue has been around however the longer this goes on for the longer it will take to fix. Plus, and this is the bit no one will probably tell you about, why would RAM manufacturers ramp up production when they can carry on producing the same amount for twice the price and make all the shareholders happier?
Our best educated guess, would to ideally see a reversal come the end of January but given our last note above we wouldn't be surprised if this went on into Q2 or Q3 of 2026. For now, expect prices to continue to climb well into the new year and hopefully you understand its not us, its them!