The second quarter has begun, and it has nasty things in store—another round of price increases for RAM and SSDs. In February we discussed a TrendForce forecast, noting that the price surge so far was likely the biggest jump in history. That itself was based just on the increases in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026. But as if those weren’t enough, another drastic price spike is coming now between April and June, making the situation even worse.
DRAM prices to jump by two‑thirds quater-over-quarter
To recap—the previous TrendForce report stated that DRAM prices (system and graphics memory) rose by 45–50% in the last quarter of the previous year (Q4 2025), and by 90–95% during the first three months of this year. The latest report confirms this but refines the Q1 2026 increase slightly upward to 93–98%.
The new report predicts that another quarter‑to‑quarter increase will follow in the second quarter (Q2 2026), averaging +58–63% compared to Q1. According to TrendForce, memory manufacturers are reducing supply to traditional customers such as PC and module makers in favor of the AI and server market, which pushes up the prices paid by other buyers.
If you add up the percentages for all three quarters, DRAM prices over these nine months should rise by 4.42× to 4.84× (when compared to the end of September). This is the average increase for long‑term contract pricing across various memory types (mobile, DDR5 and DDR4, GDDR6 and GDDR7, various HBM generations). It may not exactly match what you will see on price stickers of specific DDR5 modules for gaming PCs.
Given the extreme price swings and chip availability issues, some modules’ pricing may go up more slowly, others more quickly—depending on how badly a particular manufacturer is affected by inventory shortages and how successful they are in negotiating new supply. Smaller manufacturers will likely face higher cost increases than larger ones. In some cases, retail price hikes happening in the past months may have already anticipated this latest rise in chip procurement costs; in others, not. But on average, this further double‑digit percentage increase in contract prices will inevitably translate into higher prices for end customers.
SSD prices rising much more aggressively than expected
According to the February report, NAND Flash prices rose by 33–38% in Q4 2025 and were expected to rise by 55–60% in Q1 2026. But the real development was apparently much worse than analysts predicted—the new report states that Q1 2026 NAND prices actually rose by 85–90%. That’s the first bad news.
The second bad news is that another increase is coming now. NAND will actually be hit worse than DRAM in Q2 2026—TrendForce estimates a rise of roughly +70–75% compared to Q1. If we again total the last three quarters, this results in a price increase of 4.18× to 4.5×. In the end, NAND prices will go up almost as much as DRAM, even though DRAM originally seemed to be much more severely affected.
Again, these are long‑term contract prices. NAND Flash is the basis of all SSDs and other electronic storage (phones, consumer electronics), and represents most of their manufacturing cost. SSD prices should therefore roughly mirror this trend.
Unfortunately, we must conclude that improvement is nowhere in sight—the pricing situation continues to escalate. For both DRAM and NAND, prices are driven up by shortages and strong demand from the AI and server sectors. It appears this will continue even after Q2—further increases will stack with those already seen.
- Tip: HDDs become unavailable. AI companies bought out capacity for the whole year
- Tip: Intel and AMD to increase CPU prices by 10–15 %
TrendForce offers no outlook for when this pricing cycle might end and states that shortages and rising prices of NAND Flash used in SSDs will continue through all of 2026. And next year may also be bad, because significant increases in NAND production capacity are expected only sometime near the end of 2027 or in 2028. For the next 18–24 months, it may be wise not to buy any SSDs—or computers with larger SSDs—at all…
Source: TrendForce
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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I guess when the governments sleep the dram cartels do whatever they want…..
I wouldn’t personally feel confident stating that definitively. It’s probably mainly due to the fact that the AI market is currently evolving faster than DRAM production—but that’s just an assumption on my side, as I don’t follow it too closely. 🙂