Why RAM is So Expensive And When It Will Get Cheaper - DTNS 5154

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for November 26th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context and help each other understand. Today we have a RAM shortage that's causing prices to skyrocket. But what does it mean for you? Me? I'm Tom Merritt. What does it mean for me, Tom Merritt? I'm Sarah Lane, and I'm looking forward to finding out. We're both going to find out when we talk about the big story. Now, we've been telling you about stories for quite a while now, indicating the coming rise of RAM prices, the most recent being Lenovo stockpiling components. Today, Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham and PC gamers' Jacob Fox both have excellent explainers of what's going on, what's causing the rise.

0:49We'll have links to that in the show notes. Go read those if you want a thorough understanding. The short version is RAM prices have doubled or tripled for most variants over the past three months. That affects not only newer DDR5 memory, but DDR4 as well. And data center builders are the cause. They use high bandwidth memory. It's not used in consumer DDR5 memory, so it's not like they're buying the exact same thing. But demand for high bandwidth memory for DDR means there's less DDR to put out into the consumer market. So they're not really buying up your RAM exactly. They're just taking up the production lines for DDR to make their RAM.

1:32So yes, you can blame all those companies trying to build a bunch of data centers to serve LLMs, but there is more to it than just that. That's the primary reason, but there are some other pressures as well. We are in the midst of a transition to DDR5. More people are upgrading the RAM to take advantage of that and add that faster memory. So there is more demand for RAM right now than there would be at another part in the RAM cycle. That also means that DDR4 production is winding down. So there's less DDR4 being made. So if you can't find DDR5 and then you go looking for DDR4, well, there's less of that too.

2:09So that puts price pressure on DDR4. Solid state drives are also rising a little bit, not nearly as steeply as RAM. And the reason for that is a little bit different. Data centers buy higher quality solid state drives than consumers. So even more so than DDR5, it's a different component. But those higher quality SSDs are getting scarce. So you're seeing some data center makers starting to buy consumer grade SSDs in a pinch. That is driving that price up as well. TrendForce actually notes that more cloud providers are buying consumer level quad level cell or QLC SSDs because traditionally infrequently used near-line hard drives, basically cold storage, good old magnetic hard drives are also becoming scarce because everybody's buying them to build data centers.

3:05So really what's happening with the SSDs is not the same high usage SSDs they would use for their regular data center operations, but the cold storage stuff is getting hard to find hard drives for. So instead they're buying your consumer grade SSDs because they're not going to use them as often in cold storage. So they'll just buy those and stick them in cold storage. Anyway, that's why the prices are rising. The good news is GPU prices are down. Remember we used to, we used to talk about GPU prices being crazy. They are, they are at the COVID area, GPU conversation. We're finally out of that.

3:46GPU prices are at retail or sometimes below, although you might see a price rise in the future. In fact, AMD even said that they're probably going to have to raise their GPU prices by about 10%. The RAM used in GPU is different than the RAM we're talking about for DDR5, but it's made on the same production lines as the RAM that is in demand for the data centers. And so they can't make as much RAM for the GPU which means that's going to drive up the price of the GPUs. Now, original equipment manufacturers, the folks who sell you a PC that's already built, haven't hiked their prices yet. And so you'll see some fun stories out there like buying a PlayStation 5 is actually cheaper than buying the RAM that's inside the PlayStation 5.

4:35But they are either being strategic like Lenovo, so they've stockpiled components so they can lock in their price, uh, or they contracted out for supplies ahead of time. That's something Apple has done where they're like, we're going to get it at this price for the next five years. It doesn't matter what the market does. Uh, or they're just figuring out how to survive with lower margins. Uh, Apple famously secures its Ram, uh, supplies ahead of time. So don't expect a raise in the price of Apple stuff. Although they always overcharge for adding Ram anyway, uh, smaller makers on the other hand have less wiggle room.

5:08So if you're going with a boutique maker, like a doghouse systems or something like that, you might see them have to push their price up. We'll find out. So what is next for all of this? Is there any hope? How long are you going to have to wait for these prices to come down? Well, the one thing they can do is make more factories to make more RAM. When the price goes up, if you're a manufacturer, you're like, oh, if I made more RAM, I'd make more money. I should go make more RAM. However, building factories for this kind of stuff takes years. So that's not an immediate relief. Also, everybody's in the middle of moving factories outside of mainland China to Vietnam and India and the United States and Europe.

5:45And so they're already sinking a bunch of capital expenditures into new factories for lots of other reasons. That's also complicating the manufacturing process. And companies are going to be cautious about overbuilding because they don't want to get left with unused capacity once the demand eventually does subside. Ars Technica pointed out that memory shortages in late 2016 and 2017, if you recall, led to big price cuts in RAM in 2018 and 2019 because you had an oversupply. Eventually, the demand will drop either because the LLM bubble pops and people stop building new data centers so fast, or we get more efficient at using this kind of stuff, the LLMs, and you don't need to build data centers even though the demand is still there.

6:30An imbalance is expected to continue until at least the first half of next year, according to the analysts who study this stuff really closely. And overall shortages might persist for three to four years. But honestly, Sarah, nobody really knows. Okay. So on the consumer side, knowing all of this information that you just laid out, if I was sort of to say, well, I was thinking of buying a new PC in January, you know, how does this affect me? I don't work at a data center, but if data centers are buying more consumer level chips and RAM and, you know, all the stuff we're talking about, you know, how does this affect me?

7:10Yeah. If you're buying an off the shelf PC, you might see price rises sometime next year. So maybe buying in January is a good idea because we haven't seen it hit the OEMs yet. Although, you know, you might start to see it in January, so maybe you want to buy it sooner. If you're building your own PC, you might want to hold off, or at least you might want to just upgrade a PC you already have with other components besides the RAM, because the RAM is ridiculously expensive. At the higher ends, I would say if you're building a PC and you only need DDR4, even though it's more expensive, it's still less expensive than DDR5.

7:48Or if you need a smaller amount of DDR5, maybe you can get by and you pay more than you would have in August, but you can still build your PC and possibly build it cheaper than buying it off the shelf. I mean, your note of getting a PlayStation that's less expensive than the RAM that goes inside a PlayStation or a lot of other – for folks who like to do a DIY kind of thing, it's discouraging, I'm sure, to hear, well, you know, just buy it off the shelf. It's better than trying to do it yourself because prices are so crazy right now. They will probably regulate back to some sort of normal at some point.

8:28but you know, it's good info for anybody who's, who's looking to go into a project like that. Yeah. And it's probably not going to come back down anytime soon. Uh, I would look for creative ways to market Ram and, and see if people can help bring these prices down. But, uh, basically all the people watching this are like, we don't know how long this is going to last. It's going to last for at least six months before the prices start to come back down. So holding off is probably your best bet or buying off the shelf in the meantime. I imagine some people will try to take the RAM out of a PS5 and see if they can make that work.

9:05That's probably more difficult than it's worth for your time unless you just have fun doing that sort of thing, right? Yeah. Well, we have fun with all of our listeners because DTNS is made possible by you. Thank you too that charlie dude justin zellers carmine bailey and we've got two new patrons we would like to congratulate for being part of the show maxime and philip maxime and philip you're the best we are thankful for maxime and philip there's more we need to know today let's get to the briefs uber and china's we ride have launched fully autonomous vehicles in the 12 square mile tourist area called Yas Island and Abu Dhabi.

9:51Yas, queen. Local taxi company Tawasul Transport handles maintenance and charging for the fleet. The companies plan to expand service to other parts of the city eventually, as well as to 15 more cities over the next few years. If you're on Yas Island and are headed somewhere else on the island, you can choose the autonomous option in the Uber app, although you're only going to get one if it's available. There are only so many. We Ride is using the cars from Geely based on its Verizon Supervan. Uber partners with different autonomous car makers in different regions, Waymo in the U.S., Baidu in Asia, and Momentum in Europe.

10:29Yeah, I think Uber's strategy has proved to be a good one so far. It's still way early in the process, but it is interesting to see these start to stack up. still limited districts in big cities. But that's starting to multiply faster. And you're seeing more companies do it. You're seeing Uber partner with various companies so that it can be the place that you hail the ride, no matter which company is operating in that particular area. Working with taxi companies, I find this story fascinating. It's like we've been waiting 10 years for the autonomous cars that were supposed to be here five years ago.

11:07But it looks like maybe we're starting to get them. Well, and we talk a lot, obviously, on DTNS about which companies partner with each other to make the end experience for the consumer as frictionless as possible. And if you care about that, then you do. But if you don't care and you're like, I want to go from point A to point B and I want an autonomous car to show up where I am and take me to that point B, then we're inching ever towards that scenario. Yeah. In some situations, you can do that. Right. Yeah. Depends on where you are and how much money you have. Back in March, Plex announced that if you wanted to access someone's remote Plex server, you were going to have to start paying for a Plex Pass one way or the other.

11:55Either the server owner had to pay$7 a month for a Plex Pass, then anybody can access it that they want. or if the Plex server owner isn't paying, you as a guest can get what's called a remote watch pass for$2 a month. Or if you pay for one of the more expensive ones, that would work too. Those rules went into effect April 29th, but Plex wasn't enforcing them. They are now, finally. Plex's Roku app is the first to be affected, but they said that requirement is gonna come to Fire TV, it's coming to Apple TV, Android TV and others, and even its APIs into 2026. Well, as a person who is Plex faithful, and I don't run my own server, but I am part of, I have been invited to other people who have nice, robust media servers on Plex.

12:47This, yeah, this hasn't affected me yet. It's very possible that the server owners are just paying for their own Plex Pass. And so I just haven't gotten pinged yet. $2 a month would be totally understandable if that's what I have to pay in order to watch content from other people's really big libraries. But yeah, and Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, I'm running off webOS on my LG TV in the living room, which is where I watch pretty much all of my Plex content. I have noticed that on mobile, it gets wonky. And that's probably what we're speaking towards. Plex is like, yeah, you need to pay for a Plex pass.

13:35And I'm like, what's that? I just log in and I watch things. If it's getting wonky, that's just network stuff. If Plex is going to make you pay for a pass, it'll just tell you, hey, you need to pay for a pass. Well, that's what I mean by wonky. Not wonky as in it doesn't play or plays weird. it's more of like yeah i get like pop-ups of like plex pass i don't know what that is so yeah it's confusing though because they do try to make you think you should pay for a plex pass even if you don't uh sometimes so it may or may not have hit you yet because apparently it's only hit the roku app so far and not the mobile stuff at least not yeah yeah listen i i for anybody who is lucky enough to have somebody who has a just a great media library that they share with you So Plex is, I mean, I could not live without Plex.

14:23I really love it. It's not the only option out there, but it is a great one. A couple bucks a month. If I have to do that, fine. Yeah. I will do that. Plex has really threaded the needle of making it easy to share without getting in trouble for copyright violations, not overcharging for people, although they've been irritating people with charging for things and providing services that some people are like, I don't care about renting movies. I don't care about fast services. But they're still trying to be consumer friendly, keep those prices from going crazy. And they are a profitable company, not a crazy profitable, like we're raking it in.

15:06But they are a company that's going to stay in business, which is important if you like Plex. Indeed. Well, hot on the heels of reaching a deal with generative music maker, Udio, Warner Music Group announced an agreement with Suno. The agreement ends litigation between the two companies and gives artists, quote, full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music. New models will launch in 2026 that include improved controls and license data, and Suno will require a paid subscription in order to download creations. Suno also recently acquired music and content discovery platform Songkick from Warner Music.

15:50Songkick, yeah, it's still kicking. Warner Music also reached a deal with Stability AI and Universal Music Group reached a deal with UDO last month. So we're doing a lot of hot potato here. Peace in our time. Everybody's settling down. It's cuffing season for the music industry and AI. Yeah, it's funny to watch this. it's going to make some of the users of Suno and Udio a little grouchy because you're going to have to pay for more things now because they are now paying the artists that they are using to license. But it's going to make more artists available for you to legally remix songs and make stuff with.

16:30I think that's why Suno acquired Songkick. They're going to use that as not just discovery of music, but a way to have you interact with artists and have fun with their songs and change lyrics and stuff like that. There's going to be all kind of pitfalls along the way of people trying to do things that the artists don't want them to do. There's going to be plenty of artists who don't want this to be allowed. And that's part of all these deals is the artists can say, no, we do not want to be part of this. And I'm sure plenty of artists will. But we're kind of moving into the phase. And there was a story about Disney Plus potentially allowing remixing of video characters in their service as well.

17:09we're seeing companies starting to use these generative models as a way to let fans have a good time with their intellectual property yeah i um i i feel like the the the short-term setback i guess monetarily you know for something like udo or or suno um it it had to happen right or else you're going to go head to head with these um you know the the the old school companies and they're just going to kill you eventually. And you know, the service is going to go away. So this makes a lot of sense to me, you know, stuff I, and maybe this is just because I don't know, maybe I should be more of a creative person, you know, mentioning stuff like, you know, Disney, you know, allowing fans to get creative with stuff.

17:59It's like, where does all this stuff go? I mean, I get that I might send something to you, Tom, and be like, isn't this cute, you know or funny or clever or whatever but where does it all go you know what what what what is the purpose of all of this families and fan communities that's the answer with disney it's uh me and the kids uh remixed ourselves into lilo and stitch and had fun and that doesn't go anywhere else right and it was a great thing for your entertainment you know and maybe some of the music stuff is family as well like uh we we changed the lyrics to to the um to golden uh from k-pop demon hunter and made it about our daughters.

18:38Isn't that fun? But I think a lot of the music stuff also is for fan communities where you're like, you know, trading remixes and like, oh, what if she did this in a reggae style? Isn't that fun? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Well, big thanks to Lujuan73 for submitting this CNBC article into our subreddit, Daily Tech News Show, subreddit at reddit.com slash rsaucedailytechnewsshow. A survey from reviews.org found that the average person in the U.S. keeps their cell phone for 29 months. That's up from 22 months, nine years ago. Now that I found to be a perfectly reasonable thing to report on because it's like, oh, we're keeping phones longer because phones have reached that commodity stage, right?

19:22The improvements from one generation to another. You got seven more months of a perfectly fine phone. Yeah. Phones just don't have as much of a jump from one model to the other. However, However, CNBC turned it into the point that at the corporate level, it could delay productivity because the Federal Reserve found in a study released last month that each year a company delays upgrading equipment results in a productivity decline of one third of a percent. So 0.3333333 percent. Now, granted, that sounds really small. However, over time, that could be the difference, you know, a competitive advantage to another company.

19:57But we're talking about all the equipment in a corporation, not just the phones. Part of the CNBC report talked about how people tend to replace their personal equipment faster than corporations do because of the large expense in a corporation of rolling it out to everybody. And you have to vet it and you have to train people on new software and stuff. So the piece at one point seemed to argue for bring your own device policies, because everybody in your corporate family will have a personal device that's newer than the one that's issued by the corporation. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of them will.

20:37I felt like this article was kind of pushing something on this study that isn't there. Like going from 22 months to 29 months over nine years, when you're talking about phones not really having as big of an advantage from year to year, I don't think that's going to cause much of a damage to the economy or to productivity. I don't know about you, Sarah, but I found that CNBC was kind of pushing the edge on this one. Yeah, I mean, if they were, if the study came back as like, people, you know, now wait two years longer than they used to, you know, to upgrade, you know, hardware, then that would be something.

21:1829 months versus 22 months over the course of nine years is, okay, well, you know, you're making good hardware. People, you know, we're hanging on to stuff and you're saving some costs. On the corporate level, I can see how that's a little bit different. I've definitely worked at companies where they buy you a laptop, but it's theirs. It's not yours. And when you part ways with the company, it doesn't go with you. And that goes for phones as well. I have always been a big proponent of just let me use my stuff. Let me use my stuff. Bring your own device. Exactly. Bring your own device. Let me use my stuff.

22:03I know how it works. I am in control of it. And at any point that I have to walk the other way, all my stuff comes with me. That just makes more sense. Now, of course, that is, you know, depending on where you work and what you're doing, that might be cost prohibitive. but that's always been the way that I like to work. Yeah, because there's a cost to maintaining security on other people's devices because now they're in that person's control and there's lots of ways to do that, but that's a system of its own that's not free for a corporation to operate. I don't know, I look at this and I'm like, yes, there's an economic hit to the sellers of phones if you're not upgrading as much, but they have found other ways to make up for that by selling you services on the phone, selling you accessories for the phone.

22:51And that's not even where CNBC went with this one. They were like, no, it's the corporate thing. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know that that is as much of a deal, especially when the study is talking about phones and the corporate equipment study from Federal Reserve was talking about all equipment, like laptops, like you're talking about. I think that's a whole different situation. There's also the, you know, and I won't go too far down this rabbit hole, but the whole conspiracy theorist version of this is like, no, they make it so that you think your phone needs to be upgraded and you have to buy a new phone.

23:24I think the shows, the companies aren't really doing that. They're just making better phones that we like for a longer period of time. Exactly. They're not disabling the phones so you have to buy one. They're making better phones. And we've gotten to a point where there's only so many improvements you could make. Back when the improvements were coming fast and furious because the product line was new. That's typical with new kinds of products. Yeah, you would want to upgrade every year. But the marketing company, part of the companies obviously want to make you feel like you have to upgrade every year.

23:59But there's only so much. I don't think they engineer them that way. Yeah, not on purpose. All right. Finally, some quick headlines. These are things that are good to know if you want to understand the news in the future. OpenAI announced Tuesday that its voice This mode will now be available in the chat interface so you can see a transcript and visuals as it's happening instead of only seeing it when you're done talking. I like that. I didn't like that I had to look back later. You can choose to keep it if you like it the old way, though. They let you do that in the settings. Charter AI. We talked earlier this week about the fact that they have banned teens from their product.

24:37They have launched an interactive fiction feature called Stories on Tuesday that lets those users younger than 18 use the service, but on guardrails, right? It's not just an open chat. Qualcomm announced details for its mobile system on a chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, with a lower speed and lower price than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Elite, but with on-device AI processing. It'll show up in mid-ranged mobile devices in the coming weeks. Taiwanese news organization udn says its sources indicate apple has developed a folding screen without a crease oh that's what apple's been waiting for i guess uh apparently they've made about a hundred of these devices on an exclusive production line from foxconn and are now moving to the engineering validation stage i was just having a conversation with somebody um yesterday i guess it was and i was like i can't wait for the new apple foldable iphone and they were like why what what what's going to be so great about it i'm like i don't know now you do i'm just ready i'm ready for a form factor change next time you see them you can say no crease that's what's going to be right yeah the next company that hires me i'm like uh are you gonna buy me a foldable or what exactly youtube music has already started rolling out it's 2025 recap everybody knows those recaps with a chat feature that lets you ask it about your listening over the past year.

26:03Do I have good taste? That's what I'm going to ask mine. What did I hear in April? Counterpoint Research expects that sales of the iPhone 17 will push Apple back to being the top phone seller for the year this year, back in front of Samsung for the first time in more than a decade. Yeah, I think it was 2011, which was the last time that Apple superseded Samsung. So they're neck and neck right now. But for anybody who cares about percentages like this. Apple is, you know, the iPhone 17 line has been pretty successful. Big sales in China. That made all the difference. Yeah. A study from MIT and Hugging Face found that downloads of open LLMs from China rose 17 % this year, while downloads for US models rose 15.8%.

26:54So both are rising, but China faster. That's the first time China has passed the US in open model downloads. in celebration of finishing our 12th year of DTNS, we are giving everybody 12 % off stuff. If you're a new patron, if you haven't been a patron before, you can sign up to become a patron for 12 % off from now through the end of the week, patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you're like, I want 12 % off something, but I'm already a patron, uh, use the code DTNS rocks at our store. In fact, non patrons can do this too. Uh, Just go to dailytechnewshow.com slash store. Use the code DTNSROCKS. We'll give you 12 % off.

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27:49We end every episode here on DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Andrew in Montreal relates a strange occurrence. Yeah, Andrew writes, hi, Tom and the DTNS crew got a letter from Google saying they're changing my UK Gmail account location to my official residence here in Canada. Being an expat, I visit the UK for long periods fairly often. My UK ID is tied to that address, various UK warranties, and it's my UK contact info. I guess it's mostly cosmetic, but then maybe it's more for targeted advertising. cheers andrew in montreal yeah uh it's probably for the advertising that's i think that would be that would be by my guess andrew if anyone else has an idea of why they would do this uh let us know feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com yeah and you know it doesn't sound like andrew is all that upset about it he just thought it was weird yeah yeah but you know if if there's a situation where you're like hey this actually screws my life up in some way um you know i'd love to hear about that too.

28:56What are you thinking about speaking of hearing about things? If you have insight to a story we talk about, something that we might talk about in the future, share all of that with us. We want to hear from you. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Andrew in Montreal for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business. Get that 12 % off. Become a patron. Patreon.com slash D-T-N-S.

29:27This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people.

29:55I'm a Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. Our guests this week were Michal Roman and Andy Beach. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.