32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

I guess I'm old and haven't paid much attention recently, but $375 for 32Gb doesn't sound that bad to me.

But then again I remember spending hundreds of dollars as a high school student to upgrade my family's 8Mb desktop to 40 Mb.

Regret not buying more RAM last summer. And SSD:s as well. Prices are silly.

While back I recalled I had 16GB of DDR4 somewhere. I went and found it in an old bin box. It's now in my safe in case I need it for a machine.

This is the stupidest freaking timeline...

I built a little home server last year, and only put 32 of the total 64 GB I wanted. The rationale was that RAM is cheap, and I could spend that month's fun budget on a 8TB harddrive instead.

Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.

This is insane. Didn’t know how bad it got. I bought a mini PC a few years ago with 64 gigs in it for a home VM server for like $600 total. Looks like I’m keeping it a while.

Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.

Here's another data point for you all. Last year in April 2025 I bought 32gb DDR5 at $123.69. I checked it this most recent April and the exact same product was $679. All prices in Canadian dollars.

Can we just go back to pre-AI world?

Honestly that seems slightly down even if it’s still ridiculous. The ram I bought for $100 a year ago was $500 a couple of months ago. Could just be the particular sticks I got though

So I thought I would not be paying for that LLM BS just because you don't haven't been suckered into a subscription... I guess I was just lacking sufficient _intelligence_ to realize this kind of thing would happen.

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We're all grownups, why should we care about RAM prices? /s

This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.

Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.

As an ancient person, and considering my sense of inflation of other things I actually buy, This doesnt sound that high to me. At some point in my life CPU Ghz stopped rising and cores was the only thing to grow, and that seemed to be more slowly than clock rate did. So I guess I fully expected that asymptote to apply to RAM too. If you plot price per GB of ram across last 25 years the memory prices growth is barely a bump in the chart. In (nearly) no other physical product do we expect prices to plummet over time whilst simultaneously getting way better. Maybe we're just spoiled by the first 50 - 75 years of wild innovation that most new things go through before they asymptote ?