The price of RAM is already skyrocketing with commercial memory for PC gaming becoming ridiculously expensive for the average consumer as more resources are handed over to power AI data centers.
Unfortunately, the ongoing RAM shortage (for consumer hardware) is now expected to last well over a year with RAM manufacturer Micron confirming the lack of consumer memory will “persist beyond calendar 2026”.
Not only affecting consumer PC gaming but also smartphones, games consoles and every other form of computing device, the global RAM hogging by AI companies is expected to keep supply “substantially short” for the “foreseeable future”.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, who recently made the decision to pull out of the consumer RAM hardware to sell exclusively to companies and AI data centres, revealed that the global shortage will last longer than was previously reported.
“Sustained and strong industry demand, along with supply constraints, are contributing to tight market conditions and we expect these conditions to persist beyond calendar 2026,” the Micron CEO said in a recent earnings call reported by Seeking Alpha.
“Over the last few months, our customers’ AI data center buildout plans have driven a sharp increase in demand forecast for memory and storage,” they continued. “We believe that the aggregate industry supply will remain substantially short of the demand for the foreseeable future.”
The Micron CEO explained that consumers should “expect tightness to persist through and beyond calendar 2026”. They also said they “are disappointed to be unable to meet demand from our customers across all market segments” as they continue to supply AI datacenters.
In the same financials call, Micron reported a massive surge in profits of DRAM revenue with the company making $10.8 billion in revenue from DRAM sales.
While RAM prices and VRAM prices are surging, Micron’s report does hint that SSD prices shouldn’t be affected substantially for the time being. While AI datacenters do rely on large storage volumes as well, the company reports only a 22% surge in SSD shipments vs a 69% increase in shipments of HBM, GDDR and DDR chips.
Nevertheless, the price hikes are here, and the jump in price for the average consumer is expected to be even more significant than the GPU price spikes during the short-lived crypto mining boom. All consumers can do is hope the AI bubble pops.
