Anyone notice that ddr5 ram prices have gone sideways since Jan 2026?
I know because I bought RAM then, and if you compare now they haven’t gone up at all. Pangoly confirms this for the past 180 days.
https://pangoly.com/en/price-trends/ram/32gb-ddr5?r=US
Demand destruction is real, as is new software techniques to reduce RAM requirements (quantization, lightning index, etc). Even OpenAI announced they have found ways to increase efficiency 50% in their new model - imagine requiring half the RAM overnight for inference. It’s natural progression and evolution for software as hardware and algorithms improve. The volatility we’re seeing now in the market is a reflection of the underlying risk and fear we’re headed to a peak in price in the near future.
While I think memory prices will stay elevated for a while, we are going to soon see growth QoQ that are single digits in the next twelve months. See, markets usually sell off on cyclical commodities several months before the peak price, and compressed PE at the peak is expected vs a large PE.
Just something to keep in mind for those going yolo in memory. There is a reason why memory prices are so elastic on the way up…
