Entertainment

The 2025-2026 RAM Shortage/Crisis Explained

By William Soffronoff

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has placed a massive demand on Random Access Memory (RAM), causing prices to surge drastically. This expense is being passed onto the consumer, and it has caused a rise in the price of electronics such as laptops and smartphones.

RAM is quintessential to a computer’s short-term memory, and it serves as storage for active programs on a computer, allowing for rapid access by the Central Processing Unit (CPU). The more RAM a computer has, the more tasks it will be able to perform simultaneously, making it absolutely essential for all types of computers.

AI requires so much RAM due to the amount of data that it needs to maintain while running. The sheer scale of generative AI’s training models and data sets that it processes per input, per user, causes a great demand for short-term memory storage, which can only be provided by RAM.

While production has increased, AI has continued to scale further as well. This not only puts pressure on tech firms, but also on day-to-day consumers. An example of RAM’s cost-effectiveness on the average consumer is seen through the price of an iPhone 17 Pro, where the cost of 12GB of RAM has surged 230% from $25-29 all the way up to $70, according to WCCF Tech in 2025. While startling, this does not even demonstrate the full-scale effect of price surges that are being seen across all of tech. 

Currently, the main reason a consumer may buy physical sticks of RAM would be for an at-home computer build. The effects seen in the market for computer storage are possibly more shocking. The price of 64GB of DDR5 RAM has ballooned up 300% in just six months, according to Tech Radar, now costing over $1000.

The future of RAM prices remains questionable. Experts predict that RAM prices will decrease throughout 2026, as AI infrastructure shifts from being extremely RAM-reliant towards new options such as Google’s TurboQuant algorithm, which has been said to reduce RAM demand by up to 6-8 times its current needs (Google, 2026). While costs are beginning to settle, it is unlikely that RAM will ever return to its pre-2024 prices.