Memory is sold out until 2027, and SSDs are up 147 percent
Key takeaways
- RAM contract prices nearly doubled in Q1 2026 and rose another 58 percent in Q2
- SSD prices are up 147 percent over twelve months
- Samsung, SK hynix and Micron all report no spare capacity, with HBM agreements booked out to 2031
- Buy the capacity you need now rather than the capacity you might need later
RAM contract prices nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2026. Then they went up another 58 percent in the second. SSDs are up 147 percent over twelve months.
Those three numbers are the whole story, and they are the reason most buying advice written this year is already wrong. The usual shape of a memory cycle is a spike followed by a glut, and buyers who wait get rewarded. That is not what is happening.
There is no spare capacity to wait for
Samsung, SK hynix and Micron have all reported the same thing: no spare capacity. Buyers are booking years out rather than quarters out, and Samsung has signed HBM agreements that run to 2031. TSMC saw demand for chipmaking equipment rise 90 percent and expanded capacity fivefold, and it still is not enough to clear the queue.
The reason is that AI accelerators and consumer parts draw on the same fabs and the same packaging lines. When a hyperscaler books out HBM production for five years, the DDR5 kit in your desktop is competing with it for wafer starts. Understanding what a 2nm node actually buys you helps here, because the constraint is not clever engineering, it is physical capacity that takes three to five years to build.
China's CXMT has taken roughly 10 percent of the DRAM market off an 870 percent revenue surge, which is the one genuinely new supply-side variable. It is also the one most exposed to export controls, so treat it as an upside case rather than a plan. The same logic applies to domestic accelerator programmes like Alibaba's Zhenwu V900.
Which tiers moved most
The pain is not distributed evenly. High-capacity DDR5 kits, 64GB and above, have moved furthest because they compete most directly with server demand. The 32GB tier has held up better. Entry-level 16GB kits have moved least in percentage terms but are now close to what 32GB cost a year ago, which makes them poor value rather than cheap.
On storage, high-endurance NVMe drives have taken the worst of the 147 percent rise. QLC consumer drives have moved less, and microSD has risen roughly in line with NAND generally.
If you must buy now
The old advice was to buy headroom. That advice is dead. Buy the capacity you actually need today, because paying a premium for memory you will not use until 2028 is paying the peak twice. If you are unsure what you need, our guide on how much RAM you actually need in 2026 is the place to start.
Three specific parts worth looking at while stock lasts:
- A 32GB DDR5 6000 CL30 kit such as the Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 32GB, which sits at the tier that has held its price best
- A 2TB NVMe drive such as the Samsung 990 PRO if you need endurance rather than raw capacity
- A 512GB microSD card such as the SanDisk Extreme for handhelds and single-board machines, where expansion is cheaper than buying the larger model
The second-hand market is the sensible answer for anything DDR4, where supply is fixed and demand is falling. It is not the answer for DDR5, where second-hand pricing is now tracking new pricing upward.
The floor
No major supplier has guided toward a meaningful price drop before 2027, and the HBM agreements running to 2031 suggest the ceiling on consumer supply stays low for longer than one bad year. The part worth sitting with is that this is not a shortage in the normal sense. Nothing broke. Demand moved to a customer with deeper pockets, and consumer memory is now the leftover.
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