AIBRIEF
Per gigabyte RAM costs have snapped back to 2007 levels, and the AI buildout is pulling chip fab capacity away from PC memory.
A 32GB DDR5 memory kit that cost about $89 a year ago now runs closer to $400 at retail, and on a per-gigabyte basis the price has snapped back to where it sat in 2007, before the first iPhone launched and before DDR3 took over from DDR2.
The latest DDR5 sits between $11.41 and $13.28 per GB, according to Tom's Hardware reporting on the Stanford DRAM price index. 2008 DDR2 ran $11 to $15 per GB. Inflation-adjusted to 2024 dollars, current DDR5 ($10.94–$12.74/GB) lands on 2011 DDR3 at $11.85/GB.
Software performance scientist Daniel Lemire called the reversal a historical anomaly, with no comparable precedent in his memory.
Memory output has kept rising by about 20% per year, and the underlying technology has not regressed. What changed is the mix. AI training and inference now consume large volumes of HBM, the high-bandwidth memory stacked on a GPU package, and the wafer capacity that used to feed commodity PC memory has been redirected there.
Whether the spike persists is unclear. Lemire named two paths: either AI systems learn to need less memory, or the industry finds much cheaper memory architectures.