Gamers have already come to terms with the fact that RAM will be in perpetual shortage due to AI corporations
Hoping a burst bubble will bring things back to normal rarely pans out.
That's exactly how the situation with memory and storage looks right now, and any hope that RAM and SSD prices will return to normal once the AI boom collapses runs straight into basic market logic.
The reason RAM and SSD prices have skyrocketed is painfully simple. Data centers building out AI infrastructure are buying up chips in advance, often paying for products that haven't even entered production yet.
It creates a vicious cycle: memory gets more expensive because of modules destined for machines that haven't been assembled yet, meant for servers that currently exist only on paper and in investor pitch decks.
Worth addressing separately is the illusion that a secondhand market could save the day. Server memory and storage built for AI racks are mostly incompatible with consumer platforms, since this isn't standard DDR4 or DDR5 – it's often HBM and specialized modules designed for specific chassis with brutal cooling requirements.
Even if Chinese engineers figure out how to adapt these chips onto adapters, the way they did with server Xeon processors, that won't translate into meaningful price relief for regular memory sticks.
But the strongest argument against optimism has nothing to do with hardware – it's about manufacturer psychology.
Every major crisis in recent years has followed the same pattern: crypto mining first drove up graphics card prices, then COVID piled on top, and after each episode, prices never rolled back.
Cost never goes down. CEOs and shareholders won't allow a decrease from last quarter's profits.
There's a cautiously optimistic scenario too. If the bubble does burst, manufacturers will be left with excess capacity they'll need to offload somewhere, forcing them to court the far more fickle consumer market again.
That said, nobody's rushing to ramp up production right now – scaling up manufacturing only to scale it back down later is too costly a gamble for the three companies that dominate the memory market.
