The price of RAM is dropping rapidly right now, and the industry has seen pricing dip by close to 20% over the past month.
That’s according to a report from The Elec (a Korean tech site) which cites figures from DRAMeXchange (the memory division of analyst firm TrendForce).
We’re told that in September DRAM and NAND pricing dropped quite sharply, and that 8GB DDR4 memory modules slumped by 17% compared to August, which is a pretty huge drop in the space of a month.
RAM has been going up in price since late in 2023, but that situation suddenly reversed in August, when pricing dropped by 2% – followed by this much bigger slide last month.
As noted, this is referring to DDR4 RAM – which still represents the majority of the memory sold – rather than newer DDR5, faster RAM sticks which still command a hefty premium.
Analysis: Knock-on effect of slower than expected PC growth
Assuming the report is correct, the reason given for this drop in pricing is that PC makers have high levels of (mostly DDR4) RAM stock, so are buying less. That means they are selling fewer PCs than they expected.
As the report explains, while PC shipments went up by 4.4% in the third quarter of 2024 (and rose in Q2), that was lower than the predicted increase, which has had a knock-on effect in terms of the demand for RAM – and the price.
This is pricing for the industry (PC makers), but of course, the broader market for consumers will also reflect this drop in the cost of DDR4 – it’ll just take a little bit longer for the correction to filter through.
So, we can expect the prices of DDR4 RAM sticks to be dropping soon enough – if not already (it might be worth hanging on a week or two to see the full realization of the drop pertaining to RAM on shelves, as it were).
Furthermore, it’ll be interesting to see whether this downward trend continues. With a massive drop like this in September, though, we’d fully expect that this is simply a correction to an overshoot on pricing, and it’ll level off when October’s verdict on memory pricing comes through.
You may still see better deals when Black Friday rolls around in November – as ever, we don’t have a crystal ball – but there should be some good bargains to be had this month – just in time for Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon‘s second Prime Day sales event which takes place on October 8 – 9.
Looking more to the future, any depressed level of RAM pricing isn’t likely to be sustained – for one thing, AI PCs are set to explode in sales next year (if forecasts are to be believed), and these need more RAM to cope with those AI tasks (and peppy NPUs).
Via Wccftech