Future TechnologyShould you buy RAM now, or wait for 2027?
Key takeaways
- DDR5 prices have risen sharply through 2026, and NAND has followed.
- This is not a shortage caused by a disaster. It is capacity being deliberately redirected toward AI memory.
- Nothing in the supply picture points to meaningful relief before late 2027.
- If an upgrade is already on your list, buying now is the lower risk option.
Memory got expensive for a boring reason, which makes it worse. No factory burned down. No ship blocked a canal. Manufacturers simply looked at what high bandwidth memory sells for when it is bolted to an AI accelerator, and moved wafer capacity toward it.
DDR5 is the consumer casualty. The same fabrication lines that make the sticks in your desktop make the stacks that go into data centre GPUs, and one of those two products carries dramatically better margins. Given a fixed number of wafers, the decision makes itself.
Why waiting is a worse bet than it looks
Memory pricing is famously cyclical, and the instinct to wait out a spike is usually correct. It is less correct this time, for three reasons.
New fab capacity takes roughly three years from decision to volume output. The decisions being made now land in 2028, not next spring. Second, AI memory demand has not shown any sign of levelling off, and every major accelerator roadmap through 2027 assumes more memory per package rather than less. Third, the manufacturers are enjoying this. There is no competitive pressure forcing anyone to flood the consumer market with cheap DDR5.
NAND has followed the same path with a lag, which is why SSD prices stopped falling for the first time in years. That one hurts more, because storage price declines had been the one reliable thing in PC building.
How to decide
The honest framing is not investment, it is insurance. You are not trying to time a bottom, you are deciding whether you would rather pay today's price with certainty or next year's price without knowing what it is.
Buy now if: you are building or upgrading within the next six months anyway, you run local models and are memory constrained today, or you are specifying a machine that needs to last five years. In that last case, filling the slots at purchase is much cheaper than adding capacity later at whatever 2028 charges.
Wait if: your current machine is genuinely fine, or your workload is CPU bound rather than memory bound. Buying hardware you do not need at an elevated price is still buying hardware you do not need.
What to actually get
For most desktops, 32GB of DDR5 remains the sensible default, and 64GB is the point where running larger models locally stops being painful. A well specified 6000MHz CL30 kit like the Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 32GB → covers the mainstream case without paying the tax on exotic bins.
On storage, the same logic applies. If you were going to add an NVMe drive this year, a 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive such as the Samsung 990 PRO 2TB → is the boring, durable choice, and boring is what you want in a part that holds your data.
The part worth watching
Prebuilt machines and laptops have not fully repriced yet. Manufacturers bought memory forward, and those contracts are running out. When they do, the increase lands in a place most buyers never see itemised, which is exactly why it is easier to push through there than on a retail RAM kit.
If you are buying a whole machine rather than parts, the next two quarters are likely to be the last of the old pricing.