Anyone pricing out a gaming PC build recently has probably noticed that RAM costs significantly more than it did just a couple of years ago, and the reason has nothing to do with gaming demand. The culprit is the massive AI infrastructure buildout happening at data centers run by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Training and running large AI models requires enormous amounts of a specialized memory called high-bandwidth memory, and the factories that produce it are the same ones that make consumer RAM. When hyperscalers arrived with giant contracts and serious money to spend, memory manufacturers shifted capacity toward far more lucrative AI deals, tightening consumer supply almost overnight.The impact on pricing has been severe. Smaller capacity RAM sticks have roughly doubled in price over the past six months, while high-capacity modules in the 64GB to 128GB range have tripled or quadrupled, and those were already scarce before the AI boom accelerated.

Memory fabrication capacity takes years and billions of dollars to expand, meaning there is no quick fix on the horizon. As Namanh Hoang, Director of Branding and Marketing at CyberPowerPC put it, the industry simply was not prepared for the speed at which hyperscalers began consuming factory capacity, and the pricing pressure that created is likely to remain a feature of the consumer market for quite some time.