Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market
The article argues that memory manufacturers are artificially inflating prices for RAM and SSDs by consolidating market power and shifting toward long-term corporate contracts. It suggests this trend is forcing consumers and small businesses to pay significantly higher costs for hardware.
Why it matters
The rising cost of memory components impacts the affordability of personal computing and the viability of small-scale high-performance computing projects.
The DRAM and NAND flash manufacturers at fault for the ongoing RAM, SSD, and GPU price increases have finally figured out how to suppress the market’s previously cyclical pricing nature, and it’s by committing to larger, longer long-term agreements with fewer customers. This article deep dives into what these companies are saying out loud -- like Amazon’s interest in pushing more customers into cloud services from on-premises -- and also SSD and RAM pricing.
Editor's note: This was originally published on September 21, 2026 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.
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