- The rise in AI hardware demand has increased consumer PC building costs due to RAM price hikes
- Micron will stop selling consumer memory products by February 2026 to focus on AI data center needs
- High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is critical for AI chips and commands higher prices than consumer RAM
The increase in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware has hit the consumer PC market hard by driving up the cost of building a new computer. The price rise is partly due to a dramatic increase in the cost of Random Access Memory (RAM) in the last few months. The situation is likely to escalate after Micron Technology, one of the three major global producers of Dynamic RAM (DRAM), alongside Samsung and SK Hynix, announced it was halting consumer memory sales to prioritise the demand for high-capacity, high-bandwidth memory essential for powerful AI chips.
"The AI-driven growth in the data centre has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments," Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement.
Crucial is Micron's consumer-focused brand and has been used on RAM, SSDs, and even SD cards for years. Wednesday's decision, however, means that Micron will stop selling these items to consumers after February 2026. The company is now fully focusing on advanced high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, employed in AI data centres.
HBM is a type of DRAM that involves stacking chips vertically to reduce power consumption, helping process large volumes of data, making it invaluable in AI development. These chips are pricier than consumer memory and generally fetch lucrative margins.
While laptops and PCs use lower quantities of memory (8,16,32 GB or higher), AI chips developed by the likes of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices use large amounts of HBM. The current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip incorporates 192GB of memory per graphics processor, and Google's latest AI chip similarly requires 192GB of memory.
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Will RAM prices decrease?
As long as the AI bubble remains, a decrease in RAM prices appears unlikely. This is largely due to the increased demand from AI companies. In October, OpenAI secured deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for its "Stargate" project, an initiative requiring a massive chip supply. The projected need of up to 900,000 wafers per month by 2029 for this single project alone is roughly double the world's entire current monthly HBM production.
The development by Micron comes in the backdrop of Samsung raising prices of its memory chips last month, by as much as 60 per cent. The South Korean firm's contract prices for 32-gigabyte (GB) DDR5 memory chip modules jumped to $239 in November, up from $149 in September.
