"The first few months of 2025 were full of graphics card reviews where we generally came away impressed with performance and completely at a loss on availability and pricing. The testing in these reviews is useful regardless, but when it came to extra buying advice, the best we could do was to compare Nvidia's imaginary pricing to AMD's imaginary pricing and wait for availability to improve."
"Now, as the year winds down, we're facing price spikes for memory and storage that are unlike anything I've seen in two decades of pricing out PC parts. Pricing for most RAM kits has increased dramatically since this summer, driven by overwhelming demand for these parts in AI data centers. Depending on what you're building, it's now very possible that the memory could be the single most expensive component you buy;"
"Some SSDs are getting to the point where they're twice as expensive as they were this summer (for this comparison, I've swapped the newer WD Blue SN5100 pricing in for the SN5000, since the drive is both newer and slightly cheaper as of this writing). Some RAM kits, meanwhile, are around four times as expensive as they were in August. Yeesh."
Graphics card releases in early 2025 delivered strong performance but suffered from poor availability and unclear pricing. Memory and storage prices spiked sharply toward the end of the year, driven largely by surging demand from AI data centers. Many RAM kits rose multiple times their summer prices and several SSDs roughly doubled in cost. Examples in the tracked table show 16GB and 64GB kits and multiple SSD capacities with dramatic month-over-month increases. Depending on component choices, memory can now be the single most expensive part of a new build. The near-term supply and pricing outlook remains unfavorable.
Read at Ars Technica
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