The RAM Shortage Just Hit Your Wallet and Micron Says It Won't End Before 2028

-

I've been holding off on a PC upgrade for months, telling myself RAM prices would come back down. This week I finally accepted the truth: they're not. Not this year, not next year, and according to the CEO of one of the three biggest memory makers on the planet, maybe not even in 2028.

What Micron Actually Said

Micron's CEO Sanjay Mehrotra didn't sugarcoat it. He said the company has no line of sight to when supply and demand will come back into balance, and that 2027 and 2028 will be tighter than 2026. That's not a "short-term blip" statement. That's a "get comfortable" statement.

Even more telling: about 75% of Micron's 2027 output is already locked up in customer contracts. When three quarters of next year's chips are spoken for before this year is over, there isn't much left for the rest of us.

Why AI Is Eating Your RAM

The short version: AI data centers want High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), and HBM eats a lot of wafer capacity. Industry estimates say HBM's share of DRAM capacity will climb from about 20% today to nearly 30% in 2027. Every wafer that goes to an Nvidia accelerator is a wafer that doesn't become laptop RAM or phone memory.

And memory makers love it. HBM sells at huge margins, so they have every reason to keep prioritizing it.

Where You're Already Paying More

  • Raspberry Pi: The 2GB Pi 4 that launched at $35 now costs $67.50 after another $12.50 increase.
  • Samsung Galaxy S26: Most models went up roughly $100 compared to what buyers expected.
  • PC RAM kits: Consumer DDR5 kits have jumped by around $200 in some configurations compared to a year ago.

And this is before the holiday season, when demand usually spikes.

New Factories Won't Save Us Soon

You'd think the fix is simple: build more fabs. Everybody is. Micron has new DRAM plants in Idaho and Taiwan coming mid-2027, with more Idaho and Singapore capacity in late 2028. In Korea, Samsung has about 10 new facilities planned and SK Hynix about 7, and 13 of those 17 fabs have already broken ground.

The problem is timing. A memory fab takes years to build and ramp, and most of that real output lands around 2028. Until then, the industry is squeezing extra capacity out of existing lines by upgrading processes. That helps, but it's not enough.

What I'd Do If You Need Hardware

  • Buy what you need now, not later. If your laptop or PC is dying, waiting probably costs you more, not less.
  • Prioritize RAM at purchase. Upgrading memory later will likely be the expensive path. Get 32GB up front if you can.
  • Watch for bundled deals. Prebuilt PCs and laptops sometimes hide memory cost increases better than standalone RAM kits.
  • Don't panic-buy phones. Phone makers absorb some of the hit. Buy on your normal cycle.

My Take

The AI boom has a cost, and it's starting to show up on receipts. For the next two years, memory is going to be one of those quiet line items that makes everything from Raspberry Pis to flagship phones a little more expensive. I'm done waiting. I'm buying my RAM this month.

What's your experience? Drop a comment below! 👇 Have you noticed higher prices on RAM, phones, or laptops this year, and are you buying now or holding out?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plank You App Support and Privacy

-
Plank You is a simple, ad-free interval timer for planks and core workouts. Set your work and rest times, hold your plank, and let the countdown beeps do the counting. Everything runs on your device. no ads, no accounts, no tracking. How to use Start / Pause / Resume: tap the main button to run or pause the timer. Reset returns to Rep 1 and the start of your work interval. Rep counter — counts up automatically after each full work + rest cycle. Beeps — the last 5 seconds of every phase beep down (5-4-3-2-1), with a longer tone when the phase changes. Changing intervals Tap the settings icon (top right) to choose an interval: 45 / 15 default (45s work, 15s rest) 30 / 30 50 / 10 Custom — set any work and rest time in 5-second steps You can also toggle Beep sounds and Haptics in Settings. FAQ I don't hear any sound. Sound plays even when your ringer is on silent, but make sure the media volume is up and that "Beep sounds" is turned on in Settings. If another app is ...
Read more

WWDC 2026 Preview: Apple Needs to Fix Siri or It's Game Over for Apple Intelligence

-
Apple's WWDC 2026 kicks off on June 8, and the stakes couldn't be higher. While Google announced 900 million Gemini users at I/O last week, Apple is heading into its biggest developer conference with one uncomfortable question hanging over the whole event: what happened to Siri? I've been using Apple devices daily since the original iPhone, and I'll say it plainly — Apple Intelligence has been the most underwhelming software launch in Apple's recent history. WWDC 2026 is Apple's chance to fix that. Here's what they need to announce, what we're expecting, and what a failure would mean. The Problem Apple Needs to Solve When Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024, the demos were impressive. When the features started rolling out through 2025, the reality was a different story. The "new Siri" was slower, less reliable, and often less capable than the old one for basic tasks. The "Personal Context" features that were supposed ...
Read more

This AI Startup Is Worth $26 Billion and Writes 90% of Its Own Code — Should Software Engineers Be Worried?

-
I've been watching the AI coding space very closely for the past year, and every few months something happens that forces me to recalibrate my sense of how fast things are moving. This week, that moment came from Cognition AI — the startup behind Devin, the AI software engineer — which just announced a $1 billion funding round at a $26 billion valuation . But the number that actually stopped me cold wasn't the valuation. It was this: 90% of Cognition's own code is now written by Devin. From $10B to $26B in Eight Months — The Numbers Are Staggering Let's put this in perspective. Just eight months ago, in September 2025, Cognition closed a $400 million round at a $10.2 billion valuation. Today, that valuation has more than doubled to $26 billion. The new round was co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with Ribbit Capital, Atreides Management, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund also participating. But what's really driving this isn't hype — it...
Read more