AI data centers‘ demand for flash memory and RAM chips has increased RAM prices significantly, with SSD and HDD prices expected to follow suit.
Gaming has never been a truly affordable hobby, but PC gaming is in a league of its own. Decent rigs capable of hitting high frame rates in the latest titles run well over a thousand dollars, while a tricked-out setup with the latest and greatest hardware will have you forking over the equivalent of a month’s rent in a luxury apartment. Crypto mining and, now, AI, have driven demand for GPUs, sending prices for Nvidia’s premium consumer GPUs well north of the $2,000 mark — and things are only getting worse. AI is now causing a supply shrinkage of what were previously the most affordable PC components.
The latest components to be affected are computer storage and memory. Until now, memory prices had been relatively stable, while the massive production of flash storage led to a supply glut that caused prices to plummet. In fact, solid-state storage got so cheap that companies cut production in late 2024, hoping to drive prices back up. That was great news for PC enthusiasts, since adding more RAM or storage are easy upgrades for nearly any computer.
The AI boom is driving a run on components needed to build more of the data centers that train large models and power their use. Although the parts needed for servers aren’t the same as you’d put into a consumer PC, they use many of the same resources, meaning manufacturing is shifting toward those enterprise lines and away from consumer products. Meanwhile, SSDs are the best, fastest type of storage for servers.
