AI ate the world's RAM and the refill arrives in 2028

I wasn't shopping for a computer. Mine was seven years old, top of the line when I bought it, and still holding up, though the newest games ran on low settings and the whole thing had started to show its age. Then in June I stumbled onto a pricing error on HP's store, on their most powerful gaming laptop. The Omen Max 16 listed around 4,100 euros went through at roughly 2,400, three-year warranty extension included^[1]. I placed the order convinced it would be canceled overnight, the way these label glitches always are. HP honored it. I still can't quite believe it, and I console myself with the thought that if I had known, I would have ordered ten of them and started a small scalping business.

Two months later, what strikes me is how lucky I got, at a moment when luck is roughly the only way to buy a well-equipped machine at a sane price. Memory, the component nobody ever thought about because it was always just there, has become the scarcest and most expensive thing in consumer computing.

What AI takes out of every silicon wafer

The explanation lives in a unit nobody uses at a checkout counter, the silicon wafer, the disk that foundries slice their chips out of. A gigabyte of HBM, the stacked memory that feeds AI accelerators^[2], eats roughly three times the wafer capacity of a gigabyte of ordinary DDR5, because stacking costs yield and drilling through the dies stretches the production cycle. HBM's share of what the three big foundries produce climbs from about 18% at the end of 2025 to 22% at the end of 2026 and 30% at the end of 2027^[3]. Every wafer that leaves for a data center is a wafer that will never become your memory stick.

You can read the outcome in the order books. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have sold their memory output not only for this year but for all of 2027^[4]. Micron's CEO told shareholders the company can meet somewhere between half and two-thirds of the demand reaching it^[5]. A manufacturer in that position doesn't serve everyone equally. It serves whoever pays best.

Micron drew the bluntest conclusion in the industry. On December 3, 2025, it announced it was killing Crucial, its consumer brand, after twenty-nine years, to reserve its chips for data center customers, with the last sticks leaving retail shelves in February^[6]. Announcing the retreat by press release is at least a more honest way to fire a customer base than quietly running out of stock.

The memory kit that costs more than the console

Retail follows the same slope. As I write this, the cheapest 32 GB DDR5 kit the French retailer TopAchat will sell me runs 519.98 euros^[7], against roughly 120 euros for the equivalent in late 2025. Tom's Hardware caught the moment the symbolism flipped, when 64 GB of DDR5 went past the price of a whole PlayStation 5, discount included^[8]. The memory now costs more than the console that could house it.

The console didn't get off easy either. Sony raised prices across the PS5 line on April 2, putting the Pro at 899.99 euros in Europe^[9]. Microsoft went again on August 1, its third hike in two years, stating outright that console storage and memory prices "have increased by more than 2.5x" and that it expects "another doubling by the fall of 2027"^[10]. The 2 TB model quietly left the catalog, which is one graceful way to avoid raising a price. Nintendo's turn comes in a few days, with the Switch 2 going from 469.99 to 499.99 euros on September 1^[11]. Valve pushed the 1 TB Steam Deck OLED to 949 dollars and named memory and storage costs as the reason^[12].

Four manufacturers, four price hikes, one cause. And since Xbox came up, the executive signing this increase is the same Asha Sharma who announced the largest round of layoffs in the brand's history back in July, which is a lot of bad news for one signature.

The PC that shrinks while the price holds

The clearest symptom sits somewhere else, and you have to work in tech to catch it, because it never shows up on a price tag. Machines sold two years ago now cost more than they did new, which an industry built on depreciation hasn't seen in a long time. More to the point, plenty of manufacturers now sell you 16 GB of memory at the exact price that bought 32 GB last year, with less video memory on the graphics card and a smaller SSD to match. The price holds steady while the spec sheet loses weight.

This is happening across the board, and it's on the record. The 8 GB configuration, which everyone assumed had been buried along with the budget laptops of a few years back, is back on new machines from Dell, Acer, and Microsoft, the only way left to hold an entry price^[13]. Microsoft quietly pulled its own 32 GB recommendations off its website, while its new midrange Surface Laptop drops to 8 GB, which disqualifies it from the Copilot+ certification the same company keeps promoting^[14]. IDC expects average PC prices to climb by as much as 8% this year and notes that some builders have resorted to shipping machines with no memory at all, leaving you to source your own^[15]. That's where we are.

Nobody is building a factory for you

Which brings me to the part I actually care about, how this ends, and the answer is genuinely unpleasant. The three foundries are building new plants, but Micron's Singapore line only opens in 2027 and its New York site won't run at full capacity before 2030, while SK Hynix is aiming at late 2028 for both Cheongju and Indiana, and Samsung at 2028 for Pyeongtaek. All that new capacity will mostly produce HBM for Nvidia's accelerators rather than the sticks missing from our machines^[16].

What the foundries aren't doing tells you more. Samsung and SK Hynix are deliberately holding back investment to, in their own words, minimize the risk of oversupply, a memory of the price collapse that followed the last rush^[17]. A shortage you suffer gets fixed, while a scarcity you maintain gets managed, and the second one pays considerably better. Analysts willing to name a date see no correction before the end of 2027, and several expect the regime to outlast 2028^[18]. The only relief in sight is that the increases are slowing, with TrendForce now expecting contract prices to rise 3 to 8% in the fourth quarter after 15 to 20% in the third^[19], which amounts to cheering because the stairs got less steep.

So I think about my laptop with mixed feelings. I've bought laptops for about ten years now so I can carry the machine to a friend's place for a gaming session, which never actually happens, though I prefer not to dwell on that. Living near Paris without a car, the thought of hauling a tower and a monitor across town settles the argument on its own. In exchange I accepted the usual compromises, a machine I can't upgrade, a fan that screams under load, and a graphics card weaker than its desktop cousin. The first of those three just turned into a stroke of luck, since adding memory to an old tower now costs more than the tower, and the one serious objection to my format has quietly stopped applying.

That leaves the third. My Omen carries 24 GB of video memory where the desktop version of the same card carries 32^[20], a gap I have never once felt while gaming. I'm planning to try running AI models locally this fall, and the day I load one into that card is exactly when those missing eight gigabytes will introduce themselves. AI will have managed to cost me twice, first by setting the world's memory market on fire, then by making me miss the memory I didn't buy.