Why are RAM prices so high right now?

The short answer is: AI.

The medium answer is: AI companies, flush with cash from investors, have bought up pretty much the whole world's supply of RAM.

The long answer is that, for the last two decades or so, the global RAM market has been pretty predictable. We may want more RAM in our devices over time, but the total volume of RAM modules required each year has been pretty stable. The industry knows how many phones and PCs people will buy each year and they know what the upgrade cycles look like. Mostly, the more dramatic changes are well-telegraphed: When, say, Microsoft launches a new OS with higher system requirements, PC makers have plenty of time to order extra supply. Even as things like cloud data centers have emerged, the industry was able to absorb the demand pretty well.

AI companies have convinced both the political and investor class writ large that their products are an existential requirement. Companies like OpenAI are on a war footing, given billions of dollars and told to outspend their rivals to build out as much computing power as it can. They used a lot of that largesse to buy out entire years' worth of hardware capacity from the factories. DigiTimes claims that every manufacturer's 2027 RAM capacity has already been sold out.

To understand how disruptive the AI bubble has been to the rest of the industry, it might help to look at the impact of just one data center. xAI's Colossus site in Memphis, according to infrastructure company Introl, has 555,000 NVIDIA GPUs worth $18 billion training Elon Musk's AI. Colossus reportedly is fitted out with:

GPU Model	Quantity	Maximum RAM allocation
NVIDIA Grace Blackwell 200	520,000	192GB
NVIDIA Grace Blackwell 300	30,000	288GB
NVIDIA H100 / H200 Tensor Core	30,000	80GB / 94GB (H100) 141GB (H200)

It's likely xAI, like its rivals, equipped its servers with as much RAM as it could get its hands on. If that's the case, then this one facility could be using as much as 112,005,000 GB of RAM. And while the RAM in these facilities couldn't be put into consumer devices, it's using the same resources. If you'll forgive the inexact but telling comparison, that amount of RAM is equivalent to the RAM in 14,000,625 iPhones 17 or 9,333,750 Galaxy S26s. A Bloomberg report from March claims there are 831 of these sites currently under construction.

For more evidence that this is going to get worse, look at the deal OpenAI signed with AMD back in October 2025. The pair pledged to build out 6GW of AI data centers, with the first 1GW site using AMD's Instinct MI450 GPUs. That GPU has a maximum RAM capacity of 432GB. If we use the rule of thumb that around 450,000 GPUs shake out to around 1GW of capacity then this project alone could use up to 194,400,000 GB of RAM (or about 24.3 million iPhone 17 units). And that's just for one sixth of the total deal.