The AI RAM Shortage is Also Driving Up SSD Prices (theverge.com) 52
In 2024 the Verge's consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But "now that same SSD costs $649..."
"Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that's available to consumers" — and skyrocketing prices: The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since November 2025, and consumer SSDs across the board are seeing similar increases, much like with RAM. The 4TB version of the popular Samsung 990 Pro SSD previously cost $320, but will now run you nearly $1,000. External SanDisk SSDs saw a 200 percent price hike at the Apple Store in March....
According to price trends from PC Part Picker, NVMe SSD prices began ticking upward in December 2025, with prices on 256GB to 4TB SSDs now double or triple what they were just a few months ago, and continuing to climb.
"Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that's available to consumers" — and skyrocketing prices: The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since November 2025, and consumer SSDs across the board are seeing similar increases, much like with RAM. The 4TB version of the popular Samsung 990 Pro SSD previously cost $320, but will now run you nearly $1,000. External SanDisk SSDs saw a 200 percent price hike at the Apple Store in March....
According to price trends from PC Part Picker, NVMe SSD prices began ticking upward in December 2025, with prices on 256GB to 4TB SSDs now double or triple what they were just a few months ago, and continuing to climb.
Slowpoke (Score:2, Funny)
They notice it now? SSD prices are going up for months.
Re: Slowpoke (Score:3)
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Probably because it takes a fair bit of time to build a fab.
Re: Slowpoke (Score:4, Insightful)
I cant fathom why we have a shortage of Fabs making this stuff.
There are only a handful of companies that make NAND flash. The main ones are Samsung, SK Group, and Kyoxia. AI companies are 1) buying out all available supply of everything they can. 2) Working deals with these companies to only manufacture their orders. These companies do not have unlimited capacity and building out capacity is years long in the making. So AI gets their products and consumers get whatever is left. The demand for consumer flash has not dropped, just the supply.
probably som scepticism on long-term viability (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I could imagine some scepticism on the chipmakers part on whether most current "AI" is a viable business, or if they are mostly driven by investment money with disproportionally less actual revenue coming. If the current "AI" craze has elements of a bubble, chip makers won't hesitate selling to AI companies for inflated prices, but will be far more reluctant investing in capacity that may or may not pay back.
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Re:probably som scepticism on long-term viability (Score:4, Insightful)
Ai is just the biggest disruption ever. The execs are salivating over eliminating humans from the production chain. I doubt they have been this excited since slavery was a thing.
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Chipmakers? I remind you that the scepticism about the AI being a viable business model is so strong that even the stock market itself created whole new indexes to help hedge their exposure from what even the finance world believes is a bubble: https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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While this is a very reasonable explanation, we don't have reason to believe it's actually true. AI "demand" is a great excuse for profit taking, just as AI is a great excuse to fire staff.
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While this is a very reasonable explanation, we don't have reason to believe it's actually true. AI "demand" is a great excuse for profit taking, just as AI is a great excuse to fire staff.
Well in this case, why is the price of some of these components very high right now? Firing staff at SK Group, Samsung, or Kyoxia would not explain that. There has been no major disruptions like a natural disaster that would explain it. Tariffs would explain 100% increase in price not the 3-4X increase. At the same time, AI companies have been trying to build (at least fund the building) of AI datacenters.
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One order of magnitude is 10x. "Huge orders" would be more than single digits. So you're claiming that we're paying 10 billion times more or greater.
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At least they didn't say "exponentially."
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It depends on what you want to pay... cheaper to make them in China and that area, and then import them.
The shortage is because the LLM-AI outfits buy the RAM chips or memory cards by the multiple truck-full. What little makes it to the regular market is gobbled up the consumers the second the listing where ever is updated to show an inventory.
No chip fab would want to setup a place in the US because we're so money-hungry that minimum wage isn't enough, so we all want $18-25 to sit and supervise a machine
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"at BK, the lobby attendant runs front-of-house, the register, 'cooks' the burgers, makes the fries, assembles the burger... and front-of-house occasionally has to handle drive-thru"
Sure thing, at every BK.
One person can only do so much work, one person doing all that happens when there is no business. I worked in fast food where I cooked all food AND worked "drive-thru", that was in the 70s and I was paid $1.85 an hour. The rules of physics haven't changed.
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"...we are paying more per gig than they are by huge orders of magnitude."
Citations please.
The usual casual lying by this poster.
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There is no shortage of fabs, no shortage of RAM. There is a shortage of RAM available for purchase at reasonable prices. That's a very different thing.
All it requires is 3 manufacturers deciding, jointly, that the price should rise. They have a documented history of doing this for no reason. But when you give them an excuse - like OpenAI has - to expect anything else would be very strange.
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This is why Monopolies and Oligopolies SUCK.
They lobby the governments of the world to not be held accountable and it is in their best interest to limit production to raise demand. Without competitors why should they lower supplies or increase capacity?
Infact, the mem makers got busted3x times for price fixing in the past 25 years! Micron or Hynix even stated they do not want to increase production in case the AI fad dies and they are suck with an abundance of supply.
The US also has a far right wing governm
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Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you're a CEO of a major DRAM company. You have today had OpenAI and NVIDIA come to you each attempting to purchase out an entire year's worth a production in what economists are predicting is not just an unsustainable bubble, but even the share market has created special indexes that carve out AI companies to remove excessive risk for share market investors who also largely believe this is an unsustainable bubble.
Fabs cost $1-2 billion USD to build.
Fabs take about 4-5 ye
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You're not a small volume niche business that relies on keeping customers happy. You're selling a limited availability highly desired product with few alternatives on the market. You don't need to worry about alienating customers, they will buy from you regardless, they will come back one way or the other. You're like one of the only two restaurants in the city in your analogy.
Re: Slowpoke (Score:2)
Re: Slowpoke (Score:2)
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It both cost and demand (Score:2)
They notice it now? SSD prices are going up for months.
Its not just cost, its also demand:
- Higher RAM costs.
- Higher HDD demand by data centers, retail buyers pushed towards SSD as a result.
- Higher SSD demand by data centers, whose order get fulfilled before retail channels.
PCPartPicker? Seriously? (Score:2)
Meanwhile, there are 3 dozen other sites selling it for retail.
Re:PCPartPicker? Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon US lists it today for $394. Pretty far cry from 650. Interestingly, they list the regular price at $851.
Just convinces me it's pure profit taking. We live in a society of constant market manipulation, starting first and foremost with the President.
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Amazon US lists it today for $394. Pretty far cry from 650. Interestingly, they list the regular price at $851.
Just convinces me it's pure profit taking.
Nah, just the law of supply and demand [investopedia.com]. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up. When supply exceeds demand, prices go down. In this case, increasing the supply of SSDs takes a long time because fabs are big, expensive, and take time to construct and bring into production. So, demand has gone but supply has not (much), which means prices go up. How much do they go up? They go up until enough would-be buyers decide the price is too high and they don't want the product.
If the high demand is sustained
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>> Just convinces me it's pure profit taking.
> Nah, just the law of supply and demand. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up.
Seems to me you guys are both describing the same phenomenon using different words. A vendor who has more customers than product to sell them has a choice: he can either increase the price (and therefore increase his profits) or he can keep the price the same (leaving some money on the table, but potentially keeping his customers' loyalty). Most vendors will choose the
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What would those loyal customers do if you just didn't have anything to sell them? What would *you* do?
Supply and demand isn't just I-can-sell-it-for-more-so-I-will. Decreased supply means that vendors have less to sell so they have to sell for more to cover their fixed expenses like rent and salaries. Increased demand and/or decreased supply means there isn't enough for everyone at the original price; higher prices prioritize people who want it more.
Re:PCPartPicker? Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
A vendor who has more customers than product to sell them has a choice: he can either increase the price (and therefore increase his profits) or he can keep the price the same (leaving some money on the table, but potentially keeping his customers' loyalty)
We're talking about manufacturers, whose customers aren't consumers, or even retailers, but distributors who want to keep their pipelines full and their business operating. The worst thing a manufacturer can to do their customers, the thing that is most "disloyal", if you want to put it in those terms, is to be unable to fill orders. Distributors mostly don't really care what the unit price is anyway, they operate on a percentage markup basis. They care about dollar volume, so as long as that stays constant (or rises!) they're good.
So the smart thing for a manufacturer to do, and the thing that their customers (who are businesspeople who understand supply and demand, not end consumers who are confused about how economics work and throw around ridiculous concepts like "price gouging") understand and appreciate is a supplier who responds to increased demand by investing in manufacturing capacity... and it's higher prices that facilitate that.
A search engine for electronics with price history (Score:2)
The Tweakers Pricewatch [tweakers.net] Is a wonderful tool in Dutch of the local market. It makes it easy to evaluate the Dutch market for almost any kind of electronic device, like the WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. [tweakers.net]
Clicking on the first product link on that page [tweakers.net] lists all the Dutch shops selling the SSD with prices, including shipping. Scroll down, and at the bottom of the list of all the shops is a stock market style historical graph of both the lowest and the average price of the part, in euros .
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This is an especially bad example.
The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and rais
Spinning rust doubled in price! (Score:3)
Computer vaults (Score:2, Insightful)
Spent about $7k on a desktop three years ago and now the same hardware costs north of $30k. At the rate things are going physical theft is going to skyrocket.
Re: Computer vaults (Score:2)
Even if prices go up ridiculously, we are still spoiled with magnifi
Re: Computer vaults (Score:2)
Why would a RAM shortage drive up SSD prices? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well the demand for RAM is due to clouds providers buying blades.
Besides memory they also need SSDs to boot and run programs.
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Who the fuck writes this bullshit and thinks "yeah, that makes sense"?
EditorDavid.
And then who edits it and says "yeah, that makes sense"?
EditorDavid
And what exactly do /. editors get paid for to read this and go "yeah, that makes sense" before posting it?
EditorDavid.
You are misdirecting your hate. There's nothing bullshit in TFA or TFS. /. Editors on the other hand do get to choose the headlines.
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From the actual article:
"According to Counterpoint Research, the same few brands with the biggest RAM market share also control the global NAND market — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron." (Those three companies control 62% of the supply of NAD Flash and ~95% of the supply of DRAM.)
So if they see the AI demand as a bubble that will burst before they could recover an increase in investment in manufacturing capacity, then they would also see the AI demand for NAND flash as a bubble that will burst before t
Re: Why would a RAM shortage drive up SSD prices? (Score:2)
Not news (Score:3)
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How about sticking to a budget you can afford going for the performance specifications you need? Not everyone needs PCIe 5.0. Some people need low cost. Some people need high capacity. etc. etc.
I've got a nice one I'll sell you! (Score:2)
Just a few hundred bucks!
Soon (Score:1)
Windows EOL (Score:3)
I bought a couple ~500 gig SSDs last year for upgrading some friends computers from Win10 to Linux. They were under $50. I had a couple more to do recently, and the exact same drives are over $100 now... It's probably the same *cause* as the RAM prices going up: datacenter hype, but it's not *because* of the RAM prices going up. I also am in the market for a new 8TB+ spinning rust drive, which I am kicking myself for not buying last year when they were ~$200. Now they're $400+.
Faster the Rise, the Deeper the Fall. (Score:2)
I can just imagine how cheap SSDs and RAM wil get when this AI data center bubble Pops.
Given that the wait for electrical transformers orders from China take from being fulfilled is in excess of 5 years now. The AI centers may go out of business from lack of profits, just because they are in queue for attaching to the electrical grid.