AI DATACENTER SUPPLY SQUEEZE · CYCLE QUARTER 5
RAM prices & memory chip price tracker.
Live DDR5, DDR4, DRAM, HBM and NAND prices — RAM price charts tracked like a commodity market.
Why is RAM so expensive right now, and when will RAM prices go down? Follow spot levels, 12-month price graphs, manufacturer backlogs and the AI chip supply-chain news that moves them, updated against DRAMeXchange, TrendForce, SemiAnalysis and retail trackers. Every number is pivotable and exportable to CSV or Excel, every source is linked, nothing is dumbed down.
DRAM basket YoY
+505.00%
Unweighted mean across tracked DRAM contracts
Biggest 12m mover
+860.00%
DDR4 8Gb (1Gx8) 3200 — DRAM
Booked order value
$282B
Committed supplier backlog across tracked manufacturers
Industry capex FY
$100B
Front-end spend guidance; 7-9 quarters to first bits
Price board
15 of 53 tracked contracts · 90-day sparkline · native units
Daily H/L is the current quote day's range; session H/L is the trailing 30-day quoting window. Prices re-price every 12h (00:00 / 12:00 UTC). Last updated · next .
Some retail links are affiliate links: if you buy through one, MemoryIndex may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Links never influence a published price level, the index, or which contracts we track. See all retail deals.
DRAMMarket data
Spot board, 1 Sep: DDR5 16Gb $54.08, DDR4 16Gb $92.02, DDR4 8Gb $44.54 — all up under half a percent
The 1 September session closed with DDR5 16Gb 4800/5600 at a $54.083 average (+0.31%), DDR4 16Gb 3200 at $92.024 (+0.27%) and DDR4 8Gb 3200 at $44.544 (+0.40%). Every line is still green, but the daily session moves are now fractions of a percent rather than the multi-point jumps of June and July. The spread is the story: DDR4 16Gb printed a $117.00 high against a $42.20 low in the same session.
DRAMeXchange / TrendForce spot board ↗DRAMDownside risk
Sigmaintell: Q3 memory price increases have narrowed sharply, some categories now under 10% QoQ
Sigmaintell's Q3 2026 storage price indicator has supply and demand still tight and every DRAM and NAND category still rising quarter-over-quarter — but the rate of increase has slowed materially versus Q2, with some chips narrowing to single-digit sequential gains. Deceleration is not a reversal, but it is the first thing that has to happen before one.
Sigmaintell via ChainCatcher ↗DRAMDownside risk
DRAM contract guidance cut from +13–18% to +8–13% QoQ as buyers stop agreeing to hikes
Contract DRAM climbed 13–18% last quarter; the forecast for the current one is 8–13%. Nothing improved on the supply side — the deceleration is entirely demand-side, with PC and smartphone OEMs refusing quotes and cutting configurations. That makes it a fragile kind of relief: the moment affordability resets, the same supply shortfall is still there.
Hardware Busters ↗DRAMMarket data
DRAM and NAND fixed transaction prices set August records, but the monthly pace slowed
DRAMeXchange's August fixed transaction price for generic PC DRAM (DDR4 8Gb 1Gx8) settled at $25.00, an all-time high, with NAND also at a record. Both rose more slowly than in July. DRAMeXchange still guides PC DRAM contract prices up 18–23% for Q3 — a large number that is nonetheless smaller than the quarter before it.
The Asia Business Daily ↗
Sources we track
Every tracked level is checked against these publishers.
Daily DRAM spot board (DDR5/DDR4/DDR3, branded and eTT) plus quarterly contract settlements.
Global Memory Tracker: quarterly DRAM revenue share, HBM share and supplier growth rates.
Micron, SK hynix and Samsung quarterly revenue, operating profit and capex disclosures.
HBM supply/demand modeling, accelerator BOM teardowns, fab capacity tracking.
Per-stack and per-GB HBM pricing by generation, plus weekly qualification tracking.
Daily DRAM and NAND spot levels across DDR4, DDR5 and flash densities.
Historical retail price trends for consumer memory kits and SSDs.
Live retail minimum and market-average pricing for DDR5 kits and NVMe SSDs by region.
MemoryIndex Weekly
Monday morning, in three minutes.
Week-over-week and year-over-year moves on DRAM, HBM, NAND and semis, plus the three headlines that actually moved a price. Free. Unsubscribe any time.
Click any column header to re-rank. Bars scale to the active sort metric.
8 manufacturers · sortable · reported figures flagged in the export
RAM & memory chip price FAQ
- Why are RAM prices so high right now?
- AI datacenter demand is the whole story. HBM consumes roughly three times the wafer area per shipped bit versus commodity DDR5, so every wafer a DRAM maker converts to HBM for AI accelerators removes several times more mainstream bits from the market. Effective industry bit supply is shrinking even as wafer starts grow, which is why DDR5, DDR4 and retail RAM kit prices have run up so hard.
- When will RAM prices go down?
- Not quickly. New greenfield DRAM fabs take roughly seven to nine quarters from tool-in to meaningful bit output, and the capacity being added is heavily earmarked for HBM. Until those bits land or AI accelerator demand cools, RAM prices are expected to stay structurally elevated — the tracker's 12-month charts are the fastest way to see whether the trend has actually turned.
- Why is RAM so expensive now compared to last year?
- Compare the year-over-year column on the price board: DRAM contracts across the tracked basket are up in the hundreds of percent, and DDR4 has moved most of all because suppliers are ending legacy nodes to free capacity for DDR5 and HBM. Retail DDR5 kits absorb that squeeze last but hardest, since consumers bid against hyperscaler purchase orders.
- Where can I see a RAM price chart or DRAM price graph?
- The price explorer on this page plots every tracked contract over 30 days to 12 months, as a line, area, change or AI-exposure scatter chart, indexed or in absolute dollars. You can filter by HBM, DRAM, NAND or retail and export the underlying series to CSV or Excel.
- What is HBM and why does it cost so much?
- High Bandwidth Memory stacks DRAM dies vertically with through-silicon vias next to an AI accelerator. Low stacking yields, advanced packaging constraints and allocation-based selling mean an HBM3E stack sells for hundreds of dollars versus low double digits for a commodity DRAM die.
- Where do DRAM spot prices come from?
- There is no exchange for memory. Public DRAM spot prices come from broker surveys — primarily the DRAMeXchange/TrendForce daily spot board — plus quarterly contract settlements, company filings and retail trackers such as PCPartPicker and Newegg. Every level here is flagged reported, derived or estimate and links to its source.
- How often are memory chip prices updated?
- DRAM and NAND spot levels move on a daily survey cycle, contract prices settle quarterly, and HBM is sold on multi-quarter allocation rather than an open market. The tracker records the session date alongside every price so you always know how fresh a number is.
- Who makes the memory chips used in AI chips and datacenters?
- SK hynix, Samsung and Micron supply essentially all HBM going into Nvidia, AMD and hyperscaler accelerators, with CXMT, Nanya and Winbond in commodity DRAM and Kioxia, SanDisk and others in NAND. The manufacturer leaderboard ranks them by bit share, HBM share, quarterly revenue, order backlog and capex.
More detail on contract definitions, units and data quality flags lives in the methodology, including the ranked list of data sources.