I’ve been hearing this everywhere and the obvious increase almost exponentially of components can already be seen in RAM, chip and SSD prices.
I wanted to ask the more knowledgeable amongst us whether this is going to have a much bigger impact than just computers? Let’s face it RAM and chips are in almost everything from cars to tv’s. Does this mean that everything is going to be affected by these price increases? Is this a bigger issue than one might think?
Is AI only driving prices up for DDR5? Or all RAM?
It has already affected everything.
A 4TB Samsung T-series SSD like the one I purchased for $230 in September 2025 is currently listed for $657 on Amazon.
It seems more then the chips directly in use for AI applications are high priced or unavailable also. I manufacture a device with 1/2G or 1G flash chips and some small RAM (FRAM actually) and these are double, triple priced or worse; simply unavailable.
Part of my question is not just related to computing, but if cars, tv’s electric fryers, etc will all cost more because they use RAM and chips?
I think the amount of RAM in a TV or oven, relative to the total price of the product, probably will not have that much impact. Suppose an oven has 1 GB of RAM, which I already think is a pretty exaggerated example. That 1 GB of RAM may have gone from 5 dollars to 7 dollars. That does not make much difference to the total price of the oven.
The same goes for a car. Let us assume a modern electric car with all kinds of features, a large screen, and so on. Let us go a bit wild and say it has 16 GB of RAM and 250 GB of SSD storage. That 16 GB of RAM has gone from 100 to 200 dollars, and that 250 GB SSD from 50 to 100 dollars. That is 150 dollars more in total, but does that really make much difference on a 50,000 dollar car?
Products that use older technology might get by for a while until existing supplies are exhausted. But, AFAIK, this has the potential to affect all electronics.
AI brings miraculous positive benefits.
The miracle it may not be able to pull off is providing miraculous net benefits.
I remain amazed at the environmental people who weep for two stroke chainsaw motors but seem relatively ho-hum over enough gigawatts to time warp a DeLorean into eternity.
Yes, it’s looking like Siri may never be able to tell me who I had lunch with at Cafe Grenel, but AI was helpful during the Covid pandemic. And over three million researchers are using Alphafold today.
In the meantime we need to take good care of our devices because new ones may be very expensive. Or in short supply.
People always seem to forget how economics works. As demand increases and prices go up, more and more supply will come to fill that demand driving prices down. Higher prices will also cause people to more carefully decide how much ram they actually need and maybe buy less than that would have at cheaper prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have an overabundance of cheap ram in a year or two as the current high prices cause the market to be flooded with too much ram than we actually need.
I wouldn’t count on things getting better in the foreseeable future.
Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology together control over 90% of the market.
And a few weeks ago Intel’s CEO said, “There’s no relief until 2028.”
Economics as an academic discipline only exists because it’s never quite as simple as that. The free market is never actually free. Starting up a chip manufacturer (or even a new plant) may take much longer than the AI bubble lasts, making it an extremely risky investment to take on the existing suppliers. When you factor in the extreme levels of expertise required, the complications of intellectual property and politics (e.g. who you might be allowed to sell chips to, depending on where you are based) and general instability, there’s unlikely to be any smooth “ramping up” of supply, at least any time soon.