It feels like no matter where I look recently, there's more evidence that the RAM crisis isn't ending any time soon. Now, a new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies.
According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planned. (The companies themselves have not yet confirmed this to be the case.) Of course, that only means that retail prices are going to go up even further in the near future.
Selling through all the capacity for next year would be bad enough for consumers, but the problem is that most of the companies buying up this capacity have done so through long-term purchasing agreements, essentially pre-ordering memory that hasn't even been manufactured yet over a five-year term. Unless more capacity opens up somewhere in the next few years, it's hard to imagine that RAM will become more affordable and less scarce any time soon.
It's not just memory that's affected. According to that Digitimes report, NAND storage is growing in demand too. Luckily, NAND capacity hasn't been completely absorbed, because there are more companies supplying the stuff. But it's not exactly hard to see that SSDs have been growing steadily more expensive over the last six months or so.
Just look at the Western Digital SN7100, a pretty bog-standard PCIe 4 drive. According to Camelcamelcamel, it was about $110 in January for 1TB of storage, but now it's 52% more expensive, costing $189 before the tiny discount that Amazon currently has running. If NAND manufacturing capacity grows as scarce as RAM, I can only imagine how much that drive is going to cost this time next year.
All I know is that I grow weary of covering the RAM crisis, but it's hard to look at anything in the hardware space and not see the effects. Just this month, the Xbox Series X went up in price, and a month ago, the Steam Machine came out at a higher price than Valve wanted because of the higher cost of memory. At this point, all I can do is beg for the AI bubble to burst so I can at least buy a decent kit of RAM for less than $500 again.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra