March 2026 — prices updated. This is a fast-moving market; check WhereIsMyRAM for current availability before purchasing.

There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes from shopping for PC components in 2026. You load up a price comparison site with entirely reasonable expectations.

You’ve done your homework. You know what you want. You’re not a noob, after all — you’ve been dropping cash on components longer than Shatner’s been wearing that toupee.

You understand that DDR5 is the present and the future, and that a nice 32GB kit at DDR5-6000 is the sweet spot for a modern gaming rig.

Then you see the prices.

Then you close the laptop.

Then you sit quietly for a while. A laugh rises from somewhere you don’t want to examine. This, apparently, is your trivial existence.

Welcome to the RAM crisis of 2025-2026, brought to you entirely by artificial intelligence — or more specifically, by the companies building the infrastructure that runs artificial intelligence, who have hoovered up the global supply of DRAM like a data centre Dyson and left the rest of us rummaging around in the couch cushions for whatever’s left.

How We Got Here: A Brief History of Getting Absolutely Fleeced

For context — because context makes the grief more vivid — DDR5 was genuinely affordable as recently as early 2025. A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit could be had for around £80-90. Yes, you read that right. Boy our ancestors had it good.

Then the numbers started moving.

By the end of the third quarter of 2025, DRAM prices had increased a staggering 172% year-over-year. DDR5 RAM prices surged between 80% and 130% in the two months between September and November 2025 alone. Some 64GB DDR5 kits that were priced at £150 ballooned to over £400. Memory that cost £95 in mid-2025 now sells for over £184.

The reason is simultaneously simple and infuriating. The world’s RAM market is controlled by just three companies — SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron — who together account for more than 90% of global DRAM production.

OpenAI’s Stargate Project alone was reported to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output

All three looked at the AI data centre boom, noticed that hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were desperate for memory and had essentially unlimited budgets compared to a bloke trying to build a gaming PC, and made an entirely rational business decision: make less of what you want, more of what they want.

OpenAI’s Stargate Project alone was reported to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output, requiring approximately 900,000 wafers per month. For comparison, your gaming PC requires approximately 32GB. The Stargate Project requires approximately “all of it.”

Framework, the modular laptop maker beloved by PC enthusiasts, confirmed it was forced to increase the price of DDR5 memory upgrades by 50% as it simply could not absorb the cost increase. Micron exited the consumer memory market entirely, killing its Crucial brand — one of the few consumer-facing arms of a major DRAM manufacturer, which had historically acted as a price anchor keeping competitors in check.

Samsung halted new DDR5 orders to “reassess pricing structures.” SK Hynix announced its entire HBM, DRAM and NAND capacity was sold out through 2026. And here you are, just wanting to run Baldur’s Gate 3 without the texture streaming stutters.

DDR5 vs DDR4 in 2026: The Question Nobody Wanted to Ask

Here is the question that would have seemed absurd eighteen months ago: is DDR4 actually the smarter buy right now?

The answer, maddeningly, is maybe.

The case for DDR4 in 2026 rests on three things: price, capacity, and platform availability.

Price: DDR4 is cheaper than DDR5 right now — but less dramatically so than you might expect, and for a counterintuitive reason. There is an unusual price inversion in the market: DDR4 used in budget devices now trades at approximately $2.10 per gigabit, while server-grade DDR5 sells for around $1.50 per gigabit. As manufacturers deprioritise DDR4 production in favour of DDR5 and HBM, DDR4’s own supply is tightening. The price floor isn’t as low as you’d hope.

Capacity: This is where DDR4 makes its strongest argument. For the same money that buys you 32GB of DDR5 right now, you can frequently get 64GB of DDR4. And 64GB of RAM is genuinely useful — not just for gaming, but for the increasingly common scenario of running games alongside streaming software, Discord, a browser with seventeen tabs, and whatever background nonsense Windows 11 has decided to do today. If memory capacity matters more to you than raw bandwidth, DDR4 makes sense.

Platform: If you’re building a new system from scratch, you’re on DDR5 — Intel’s 12th gen onwards and AMD Ryzen 7000 onwards both mandate it. But if you’re upgrading an existing Intel 11th gen, 10th gen, or AMD Ryzen 5000 system, DDR4 is your only option anyway, and the question becomes whether to upgrade the whole platform or just add more sticks of what you already have.

The case against DDR4: You’re buying into a deprecated standard. Manufacturers are actively reducing production. In two or three years, when you want to upgrade again, you’ll be fishing in an even shallower pool. DDR5 is the platform for the next decade. Buying DDR4 in 2026 feels a bit like buying a very good horse in 1920.

What Are the Smartest Options Right Now?

Since prices are moving constantly, specific kit recommendations will date faster than this article can be updated — so here are principles rather than part numbers.

If you must buy DDR5 now:

Prioritise DDR5-4800 or DDR5-5600 over DDR5-6000+. The faster kits use “binned” chips — selected for their overclocking headroom — and tighter-timing modules have seen the most abrupt price rises precisely because they use premium chips that manufacturers can also sell into server configurations. DDR5-4800 is noticeably cheaper, and the gaming performance difference between 4800 and 6000 is real but modest. You’re not leaving much on the table.

4 DDR5 RAM sticks. Now that’s luxury (Image credit: Trident)

32GB (2x16GB) remains the sweet spot for gaming. 64GB at current DDR5 prices is genuinely painful and only worth it if you’re doing content creation alongside gaming.

G.Skill, Kingston Fury, and Corsair Vengeance have maintained relatively better availability than smaller brands. Check stock daily rather than assuming availability — the market is moving.

The eBay angle — seriously consider it:

This is the move that sounds strange until you do the maths. Buying a second-hand DDR5 system — an old office workstation that shipped with a Ryzen 7000 or Intel 13th gen processor — and cannibalising its RAM is frequently cheaper than buying new DDR5 sticks retail. The RAM was purchased before the price spike, installed, lightly used in an office environment, and is now available at a fraction of current retail pricing. The PC it came in either goes back on eBay for parts or becomes a second machine.

Used DDR5 RAM from reputable sellers with return policies carries a reasonable risk profile. Memory either works or it doesn’t — run Memtest86 for a few hours and you’ll know within an afternoon.

If you’re on an older platform:

Adding more DDR4 to an existing system is almost always the right move over a full platform upgrade right now. The cost of a new Intel 14th gen or AMD Ryzen 7000 motherboard and DDR5 kit vastly outweighs any performance gain you’ll see in games. DDR4 at 3600MHz on an existing Ryzen 5000 system with a good GPU will still play every current game well. Upgrade when the RAM market normalises, not while it’s at peak derangement.

When Does This End?

The honest answer is: not soon, and probably not as soon as the optimists are claiming.

IDC has warned that the shortage could persist well into 2027, calling it an “unprecedented memory chip shortage with knock-on effects that could persist well into 2027.” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has warned that RAM price increases will be a real problem for high-end gaming for several years.

The structural problem is that AI demand isn’t a spike — it’s a baseline shift.

The more cautious view: relief is probably not before the second half of 2026, when production is expected to start catching up with AI demand. The slightly more pessimistic view, backed by IDC: even with manufacturers ramping production, DRAM output growth of more than 20% in 2026 may not be sufficient to offset AI-driven demand.

The structural problem is that AI demand isn’t a spike — it’s a baseline shift. The Stargate Project doesn’t complete and then stop needing memory. Every new AI model, every expanded inference cluster, every additional data centre represents permanent ongoing demand. Manufacturers aren’t going to dramatically increase consumer allocation while hyperscalers are willing to pay premium prices for everything coming off the production line.

Analysts warn this could be a prolonged “supercycle” of memory price hikes rather than a short-term spike. If you were planning to wait for prices to fall back to 2024 levels: keep waiting, but don’t hold your breath.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Where This Is All Going

Here is a thought that the PC gaming community is understandably reluctant to sit with: the AI data centre boom that is destroying RAM prices is being built, in significant part, to power the services that will eventually replace the need to have expensive RAM in your gaming PC at all.

GeForce NOW is currently streaming games at up to 4K/120fps. Shadow PC offers a full cloud gaming desktop. Xbox Cloud Gaming has gone from a joke to a genuine option. PlayStation’s cloud offerings are expanding. None of these services require you to own DDR5-6000 or any RAM at all — they require you to own a reasonably capable internet connection and a device with a screen.

The Cloud is coming, and with it a storm of lag and latency (Image credit: NVIDIA)

The same AI infrastructure that is currently making your RAM unaffordable is simultaneously becoming the backbone of the cloud gaming services that make local RAM increasingly optional. This is, depending on your outlook, either a beautifully ironic market correction or the most depressing sentence in the history of PC gaming.

We are not here to tell you to give up. We are PCZ. The PC platform remains the best gaming platform ever created. Local hardware is still superior to streamed hardware for latency, for modding, for ownership, for the satisfaction of building your own machine and watching it boot for the first time.

But the trajectory is clear, and the AI companies buying all the RAM are inadvertently funding the infrastructure that will, eventually, make owning RAM optional. Whether you find that liberating or appalling probably depends on how recently you checked DDR5 prices. Whichever way things go, Jensen will still be laughing.

The PCZ Verdict: What Should You Actually Do?

Three scenarios, three answers:

If you can wait — wait. The second half of 2026 is the earliest realistic point at which prices might moderate. If your current system is playable, keep playing it. Nothing releases in the next six months that will require more RAM than you already have.

If you can’t wait and need to buy now — consider the eBay cannibalisation route seriously. It’s unconventional, it works, and it’s frequently the cheapest path to DDR5. If that’s too much faff, buy DDR5-4800 at 32GB from a major brand, accept you’re paying a crisis premium, and move on.

If you’re on an older platform — add DDR4, don’t upgrade. The performance gap between “enough DDR4 at 3600” and “DDR5 at crisis pricing” is not worth the money right now. Upgrade the platform when RAM comes back to earth.

And if none of that is appealing: NVIDIA GeForce NOW Ultimate is £17.99 a month. We’re not saying it. We’re just saying it’s there.

Last Updated: March 2026. Prices move daily — check current DDR5 availability at your preferred retailer before purchasing. For an explanation of what DDR5 is and how it compares technically to DDR4, see our DDR5 RAM Guide.