BEAT THE MEMORY SHORTAGE

Memory and component prices are going to be sky high for the foreseeable future. Lee Grant reveals how you can avoid paying over the odds

It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that the prices of RAM and SSDs have rocketed over the past nine months. Affordability and availability have taken a hammering, leaving system builders, repairers and resellers all struggling to find parts in a market with barely any stock.

Vintage readers will have witnessed this phenomenon several times over the years, with pricing spikes blamed on random natural disasters – a wildfire torching a manufacturing plant or a tsunami washing away a warehouse or two. The usual remedy is to sit tight and wait a few months for normality to resume, but that strategy won’t work this time. The current memory crisis isn’t a freak of nature, and multiple industry insiders have told PC Pro that prices are expected to rise for at least the next year.

We’re here to help with practical advice, tips and guidance from expert vendors and manufacturers. We’ll show you how to avoid the steepest price premiums and how to maximise the upgrade potential of your current machine, unlocking the performance potential of the technology you’ve already paid for. We’ll also explain how to grab refurb bargains that are as reliable and risk-free as buying new.

Why have memory prices skyrocketed?

The blame for the current crisis is being laid at the door of AI. The world’s three major memory producers – SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron – have switched their resources to the production and development of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which powers AI data centres.

HBM uses a stack of interconnected memory wafers, making it a vastly more complicated manufacturing process than standard DRAM. Critically, the creation process also uses more silicon and generates lower yields, but the payoff is that HBM is hugely profitable, which brings us closer to the truth about what’s really going on.

Let’s look at the financials published by Micron. The company’s first quarter 2026 financial call revealed its revenue for the previous quarter was $13.64 billion versus $11.32 billion for the prior quarter, and a 57% increase on the same period in 2024. Micron expects higher prices and lower costs to contribute to “gross margin expansion” in Q2.

To allow Micron to make even more hay, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra explained the company’s shift in production focus. “As more wafer capacity is diverted to HBM production, which requires approximately three times the wafers of standard DDR5, we expect the supply of standard DDR to remain structurally tight,” he said. This last statement was exemplified at the end of last year when Micron announced it was closing Crucial, one of the best-known memory and storage brands of the past three decades.