As if the news wasn’t bad enough, have you heard that DDR4 RAM has shot up by around 172% since the shortage began? That’s right, the last generation tech has been sought after by both consumers and enterprise-level customers.
The news comes from Chinese outlet, CTee, who report that data acquired via Goldman Sachs shows DDR4 RAM prices shooting up far faster than DDR5. According to CTee, the Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific team has hit the buzzer for red alert on not buying DDR4 hardware.
Despite being older hardware, it’s still the AI server customers that are gobbling up the hardware. There are now predictions that it’s only a matter of months before pricing on hardware containing DRAM chips, the center of the issue, will begin to increase. It isn’t just PCs that use RAM, so expect your next phone upgrade or TV purchase to be higher than usual.
DDR4 is still actively supported on Intel processors 12th generation and below, as well as AMD hardware on the AM4 platform. As AMD has kept the AM4 platform relatively alive in the gaming space with its X3D processors, providing excellent performance for the price, DDR4 RAM was seen as a potential way around the current excruciating costs.
No rest for the wicked, as AI gobbles up DDR4 as well
By this point in the timeline, we should have seen dirt-cheap DDR4 sticks. In fact, we did, for a time. In August 2024, a 16GB DDR4 kit rated at 3600MHz was around the $50 mark.
That sustained way until June 2025, when tariffs from Trump began to impact electronics. As the tariffs became more of a problem, prices rose steadily until around September, and from October onwards, they have been on a steady uptick.
For those wanting more than 16GB, like 32GB, DDR4-3200 32GB kits shot up dramatically from July 2025, and have now reached the near $300 mark.
These are the types of prices I wouldn’t expect to see until DDR4 had completely bitten the dust. There are also out of China that some consumers are now resorting to hunting for DDR3 RAM, just to make do for now.
As of right now, there’s absolutely no way that anyone can predict where this will all go. It’s going to be a long 2026, and if the tech bods are to be believed, we might not see the end of this until 2027 or beyond.
The post DDR4 RAM prices are shooting up faster than DDR5 as AI migraine continues appeared first on The Escapist.
