Why RAM Prices Are Out of Control
If you have looked at RAM prices lately and felt your wallet crying, you are not alone. During CES 2026, Patriot Memory’s marketing manager Shannon Robb sat down for a candid chat about what is really going on with system memory and why upgrades feel so painful right now.
The short version: artificial intelligence is devouring the memory market.
Robb explains that major AI companies have bought around 40 percent of the wafer production that eventually becomes memory chips. These are not even finished RAM modules or packaged chips. They are raw wafers that get turned into integrated circuits later.
That huge grab of supply creates a bottleneck for everyone else. There are only a handful of true DRAM chip makers in the world such as Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix. Brands like Patriot are module makers. They buy those chips, put them on PCBs, add heatspreaders and RGB and sell them as the sticks you buy.
When wafer and IC supply gets squeezed, the cost of those chips shoots up. Patriot and other module makers cannot escape that. As Robb puts it, they are definitely not laughing their way to the bank. They have to pay the going market price for ICs and then try to make it all work without losing money.
To make things even stranger, a lot of the memory hardware snapped up for AI is not fully online yet. Power and data center capacity are still catching up. So there are huge volumes of wafers and chips sitting in storage while gamers stare at rising prices.
How Long Will This Memory Crunch Last
The obvious question is when RAM prices might finally calm down. Unfortunately nobody has a solid answer, including the people inside the industry.
Robb says that even from Patriot’s perspective, it is basically guesswork. Earlier expectations that prices might settle in the first half of 2026 are already looking optimistic. Major chip manufacturers have publicly said they do not want to ramp up capacity too aggressively because they fear ending up with massive oversupply when the AI wave eventually slows.
That means the current tight supply could last longer than many hoped. If Samsung, SK Hynix and others keep output carefully limited, market prices stay high. Patriot for its part is committed to staying in the consumer memory space rather than pivoting entirely to data centers like Micron has started doing. The company has been around for over four decades and plans to ride this out.
Still, Robb does not think we have reached peak pricing yet. The trend is up, not down, which leads to one uncomfortable conclusion for PC builders: waiting for a magical price collapse in the near term is probably not a good bet.
Smart Upgrade Decisions For PC Gamers
All of this begs the important question. As a gamer or PC enthusiast, what should you actually do right now?
Robb’s advice is refreshingly practical and applies just as much to GPUs as it does to RAM.
If your current system still plays the games you enjoy, you do not need to upgrade. Fancy benchmark numbers are not worth emptying your bank account.
If you must buy RAM, sooner may be better than later, because prices look likely to climb more before they fall.
Buy a kit that makes sense for your use case rather than chasing the most expensive model on the shelf.
He also points out a very common mistake: many people buy high spec memory kits and then never even enable XMP or EXPO in the BIOS. That means their fancy DDR5 is just running at standard Jedec speeds anyway and they are not getting the performance they paid for.
For a lot of users, a simple Jedec speed kit would give the same real world performance they are seeing now, at a lower cost. If you are not the kind of person who tweaks BIOS settings, going for a more reasonable kit can save a lot of money without hurting your gaming experience.
It is also important to be honest about the type of games you play. If you are mostly into card games, indie titles or slower paced RPGs and narrative games, your performance demands are far lower than someone chasing high frame rates in the latest competitive shooters. In that case, splurging on premium RAM for tiny gains does not really make sense.
Robb’s rule of thumb is to focus your budget where it matters most.
If you save money by not buying an overkill memory kit, you might be able to step up a tier on your GPU or CPU.
You could also put those funds toward a better motherboard, more effective cooling or a larger SSD so you can keep more games installed without constant juggling.
The same logic applies across the whole PC. Power supplies and CPU coolers are also seeing cost pressures from rising raw material prices, completely separate from the AI driven memory spike. So a full system overhaul is not going to get cheaper any time soon.
The bottom line for PC gamers is simple. If your rig is still running your favorite games comfortably, you can safely hold off on upgrading. When you do upgrade, be deliberate. Choose memory that fits your needs, make sure you actually enable the performance profiles your kit supports and try to spend where you will see the biggest real world improvement.
The industry will eventually correct as supply and demand balance out. Until then, smart buying and realistic expectations are your best weapons against sky high RAM prices.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/major-memory-module-manufacturer-says-trust-me-were-not-laughing-our-way-to-the-bank/
