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Hey. Psst. Listen here. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but RAM prices are kind of insane. Bad enough that people are getting desperate to find ways to save a little money. Desperate enough, for example, to manually de-solder the memory chips off of laptop RAM and re-solder them onto a blank desktop RAM circuit board. Which is exactly what one modder did. According to VideoCardz.com, a penny-pinching PC user in Russia bought up much older, cheaper DDR4 RAM in laptop SO-DIMMs, painstakingly removed the individual memory chips by hand, and then manually soldered them in place on a pair of blank DDR5 DIMMs. With lots and lots (and lots, soldering microchips is incredibly fiddly) of work and a bit of custom firmware loaded, the Frankenstein deed was done. The “price” for a single 32GB stick of assembled DDR5 came out to a bit more than 17,000 rubles or approximately $218 US dollars. That’s about a third the price of what that hardware currently goes for in Russia, according to the modder, and it looks like he has the tools and the know-how to make multiple sticks of RAM… if he can keep sourcing the chips. The modder, Viktor “Vik-on” Veklich, seems to know his business; he sells a series of RAM tester parts, most recently a DDR5 model. This isn’t the only example of people getting creative — or desperate — to find new memory. Users are looking into laptop-memory-to-desktop adapter parts, now frequently sold out on Amazon. This is older, slower DDR4 memory, but any memory port in a storm. We’re also seeing more interest in new parts that use older, easier-to-find memory and processors, like brand new motherboards with AMD’s AM4 socket and DDR4 memory compatibility. Read...

Micron—one of the “big three” companies that manufacture the vast majority of memory on the planet—is shutting down its Crucial brand. This is the arm of the company that sells RAM and storage products directly to consumers. Instead, Micron is shifting its focus to the “AI” boom… the same situation that’s making memory explode in price all over the world. Consumers are, to use a technical term, pissed. In a recent interview, a Micron vice president tried to downplay the situation, explaining that Micron is still technically supplying RAM and other memory products to consumers… by selling it to PC manufacturers. “Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world,” said Christopher Moore, VP of Micron’s Marketing, Mobile and Client Business Unit, in an interview with Wccftech. “We’re just doing it through different channels. We still have a very sizable business in the client and mobile markets.” He continued: “We are also, of course, servicing our data center customers.” The notion that Micron hasn’t completely abandoned consumers because it’s still supplying at least some PC manufacturers was one I heard at CES last week. It was similarly unconvincing there, too, as company after company refused to commit to pricing for forthcoming products, for fear of rising memory prices erasing their profit margins before release. Those data center customers are the reason why RAM prices are skyrocketing: rapid, massive buildup for the “AI” industry is gobbling up most of the current and projected chip supply. Put aside the debate on whether LLM-powered businesses are in a bubble. Truth is, good old fashioned supply and demand is still in play, raising prices considerably on finished laptops and desktops and making DDR5 memory for consumers triple or even quadruple in price. Micron—now making hay while the sun shines—is shuttering its Crucial brand at the end of January. This ends nearly 30 years of selling to consumers for PC building, repairs, and upgrades. Foundry “This is not a Micron issue, it’s an industry issue… and there’s just not enough supply to go around,” said Moore to Wccftech. It’s an echo of the statement Micron made in its announcement (e.g., it’s following the money). That’s certainly true, but I hasten to note that neither of Micron’s competition—Samsung and SK Hynix—have yet shuttered their direct-to-consumer memory and storage product lines. (That sound you hear is me knocking on the wood of my desk.) If the first question asked at CES was “What are we going to do about the memory crunch?” and the answer was a big, disappointing shrug, then the next question was “When is it going to end?” I’ve heard estimates all over the place, ranging from 2027 up to 2032, as today’s developing data centers will still be sucking up chip supply into the next decade. Moore is a little more optimistic than that, citing a new Micron manufacturing facility that will be finalized in 2027, according to an interview with PCWorld’s Mark Hachman. In just a few days, Micron is planning to break ground on a New York facility that’ll be the biggest semiconductor factory in the US. But with 3 to 4 years of construction and fitting required for a new fabrication plant (on the low end), it’s still going to be a long, long time before expanded manufacturing capacity can start chipping away at the current supply crunch. That’s assuming the macroeconomic AI bubble doesn’t burst, of course. But if that happens, we’ll all have more problems than merely trying to afford a gaming desktop upgrade. Read...

The ongoing DRAM and flash memory / SSD shortage shows no signs of alleviating, with memory vendors telling PCWorld that the shortages in both markets will continue to drag on for months, even years. The CES 2026 trade show in Las Vegas last week was an opportunity for customers to talk to suppliers and vice versa, trying to scrounge up whatever memory chips they could. But the news just keeps getting grimmer. In mid-November, analysts began reporting that DRAM prices could rise throughout the first half of 2026. In early December, Micron said that it would discontinue its Crucial brand and its practice of selling DRAM directly to consumers. Kingston has also warned that prices will continue to go higher in the near term — pushing PC prices upwards as well. Executives at Micron say those customers — presumably including PC makers — are now asking for multi-year deals to assure supply. “I think, from our view, 6 to 12 months looks to be extremely constrained, and even out to 24 months looks very, very constrained,” said Mark Montierth, senior vice president of the mobile and client business unit at Micron, in an interview with PCWorld.com at CES. “DRAM, for sure. SSD maybe not as much, but that’s because there are more players, and it’s harder to triangulate all that.” Chris Kooistra, the vice president of marketing for Other World Computing (OWC), which manufactures SSDs, told PCWorld he sees the SSDs being constrained for at least six months, following a price spike in 2025. OWC sold SSDs at a higher price on Black Friday than at the beginning of November because of the unexpected and unavoidable price increases, he said. A third source at a peripherals manufacturer that buys memory and storage for its own uses also characterized the situation: “Best guess, SSDs, many months. DRAM, I don’t know. Years, maybe.” Close to chaos When a financial market careens out of control, governments can put a halt to trading to give the industry a breather, and restore order. There has been no such pause for the memory market, which traditionally cycles between boom years, when prices soar, and busts, when they plunge. Both SSDs and memory modules are tied very closely to the individual prices of flash chips and DRAM, as they don’t have that much more additional logic. As hyperscalers have snatched up every bit of memory and storage they can, the commodity memory makers say they have to keep up. Micron, for example, justified its closing of Crucial by noting that the total market for data centers rose from about 40 to 60 percent. (Micron still sells memory modules, even to consumers — just indirectly, via PC makers. “The [Crucial] storefront that lets you buy stuff from us is shutting, but not our support for that [consumer] market,” Montierth said.) “So it’s not that we’re focusing on that market, it’s that market is just exploding so fast,” Chris Moore, Micron’s vice president of marketing for the client business, added. “We have models internally of how much of our supply we want to go into every segment, and that segment is growing so fast that it’s just to maintain our share there is requiring more bits.” Right now, the shortages in both memory and storage are demand based, and simple economics says that when demand increases and supply remains the same, prices will increase. But it’s not an orderly market; companies have little time to plan. Phison, which manufactures SSD controllers as well as “white label” SSDs sold under other brands, reportedly is sold out for 2026, Digitimes reported, with chief executive Khein-seng Pua reporting that most NAND makers are sold out for the same period. The short-term “spot” market is drying up. And no one quite knows what to expect. “Most companies have an agreement each year of general allocation, then it is discussed and updated quarterly with pricing amounts,” Phison U.S. president Michael Wu said, as reported by Phison representative Lynn Kelly in an email to PCWorld.com. “The recent shortage has changed these typical planning cycles, however, since demands are exceeding industry supply. So allocation today is based on market dynamics.” Unless the AI market folds, the only real way out is new fabs Some strategies that might work in the logic market. Both AMD and Nvidia are considering reviving cheaper outdated silicon just to provide customers a price break, and — in the case of AMD — allow them to use older DDR4 memory modules instead. (The problem with that approach is that the DDR4 market is essentially dead, as DRAM makers have moved on to DDR5.) And in storage, manufacturing older flash memory simply wouldn’t offer as much storage, making them less “bit dense” and exacerbating the problem. Micron launched a single-sided M.2 2230 SSD, the Micron 3610, at the show, with capacities from 1TB to 4TB. New fabs also take years to complete; Micron broke ground on a DRAM fab in Boise in October 2023, and Moore said that first output will be in mid-2027. (Micron originally said DRAM output would begin in mid-2026.) At CES, Micron also announced that it will break ground on Jan. 16 on a new $100 billion megafab in New York that will potentially be the largest semiconductor facility in the U.S. We’re all on the same boat now, after the downturn in 2023 that was so painful,” Moore said. “No one could afford to go build new fabs…That’s what we’re paying for right now, when consumers were really happy.” Read...

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