PC DRAM Prices, Which Had Slowed, Are Rising Again... Up 10-Fold in a Year [IT Item of the Day]

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[Financial News] The price of general-purpose DRAM has risen tenfold over the past year. NAND flash memory prices have also climbed for 16 straight months. The trend is being attributed to persistent supply shortages driven by surging demand from AI data centers.
According to market researcher DRAMeXchange on the 30th, the average fixed transaction price for a general-purpose PC DRAM product (DDR4 8Gb 1Gx8) stood at $16.00 at the end of April. That was up 23.08% from the previous month.
The average price of DDR4 had risen for 11 consecutive months since April 2025, when it stood at $1.65. It reached a record high of $13.00 in February, the highest level since the survey began in June 2016, but last month it held steady at the same price as in February, slowing the upward momentum.
The average DDR4 price has surged tenfold in the year since April 2025, when it was $1.65. DRAM prices are now at their highest level since the survey began in June 2016.
TrendForce forecast that DRAM prices could rise by as much as 50% in the second quarter of this year. The outlook reflects worsening supply shortages as major memory makers have recently continued to phase out production of older products at DDR4 and below. Expansion of production facilities by Taiwanese companies is also moving slowly.
The average fixed transaction price in April for a general-purpose NAND product used in memory cards and USB drives (128Gb 16Gx8 MLC) was $24.26. That was up 36.29% from the previous month’s $17.73, marking 16 consecutive months of gains.
As suppliers concentrate their production capacity on high-capacity 3D NAND, shortages of mature-process products such as single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) devices are deepening.
Memory companies are focusing on high-capacity, high-performance enterprise SSDs as the AI industry shifts from training to inference. While they ramp up production of memory for AI servers, which carries higher added value, shortages continue in consumer SSDs and mobile products.
mkchang@fnnews.com Jang Min-kwon Reporter