RAM Went Vertical
And Our Games Are Hungry

The Memory Squeeze
What It Means For Your Rig

• Author:

  Watty

• Category:

  General Gaming

• Date:

  Aug 25, 2026

If you have priced up a PC upgrade recently you already know. Memory has gone vertical. Reports this month put a 32GB DDR5 kit anywhere between roughly $380 and $589, against something in the region of $95 before the shortage took hold. Some capacities are reported up 400 to 600 percent.

PC Gamer summed it up by quoting a researcher's verdict that "we just undid about 20 years of progress" on memory pricing. That is the part worth sitting with. RAM has been the one PC component that reliably got cheaper and bigger every year, to the point that "just put 32GB in it" stopped being a decision. That assumption is temporarily dead.

Why it happened

This is not a factory fire or a shipping problem. It is a deliberate reallocation. The big three memory makers, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, have been shifting fabrication capacity away from ordinary consumer DDR5 and NAND toward HBM, the stacked high-bandwidth memory that sits next to AI accelerators in data centres. Demand there is effectively unlimited and the margins are far better, so consumer sticks lost the argument. Forecasts have AI consuming around 20 percent of total DRAM production this year, while overall DRAM supply grows only about 16 percent year on year.

Why this one lands on us specifically

Because the games we play are memory hungry. Star Citizen asks for 32GB in its recommended spec and genuinely uses it. Elite Dangerous with Odyssey is happier with headroom than without. Anyone running multiple EVE clients is doing the single most RAM-intensive thing in this hobby. A memory squeeze hits a space sim crowd harder than it hits someone playing 2D indies.

What to actually do about it

Nothing dramatic, and that is the point.

If your machine currently runs your games, this is a poor moment to upgrade for the sake of it. Waiting costs you nothing.

If you are building or must replace a stick, buy the capacity you actually intend to end up with in one go. The old habit of fitting half now and topping up later assumed prices would fall, and matching a kit in a year could be considerably more painful than it used to be.

Do not panic buy either. Tom's Hardware has reported the consumer side of the surge starting to cool as buyers simply hit an affordability ceiling and demand softens. Broader forecasts still point to elevated pricing through 2027, with meaningful new capacity not arriving until late 2027 or 2028, so this is a "sit tight" situation rather than a "buy now before it doubles" one.

Talking shop with the crew

Rig talk is a permanent fixture in our Discord, and if you are weighing an upgrade against what you actually play, it is a decent place to get a second opinion before you spend. Have a look at the games we play if you want to know what we are running it all for.

Further reading: Tom's Hardware: one year into the AI-induced RAM apocalypse | More from The Exiles blog