- Samsung has reportedly doubled the price of DDR5 RAM
- This is the contract price for DDR5 charged by RAM manufacturers
- As always, price increases in the supply chain will be passed on to consumers – if this rumor is correct, of course
There’s even more worrying news about the cost of RAM, as Samsung is rumored to be seriously increasing the price of DDR5 memory (and DDR4 prices are still rising too).
Notebookcheck.net discovered that leaker Jukan on X posted an article from a Taiwanese tech news site (Technowvoice.com) which claims that Samsung has just raised the contract price of the DDR5 chips it supplies to memory manufacturers.
Taiwanese media: DRAM price rise shows no signs of stopping. According to Taiwanese media reports, Samsung has abruptly raised the DDR5 contract price to $19.50, bringing it close to $20. This figure represents an increase of more than 100% compared to the previous…15 December 2025
Of course, take this with some skepticism, but the claim is that Samsung is now charging a contract price of $19.50 (per 2GB memory chip) for 16GB of DDR5, which is more than double what it was previously when this increase came in late November, we’re told.
Let that sink in – prices have more than doubled (it was $9) and while this is for supply chain costs, as always this increase will be passed on to consumers who will foot the bill in the end.
Technowvoice describes the RAM industry as being in a state of “structural disruption” and that with this latest price increase, Samsung simply told its downstream customers that there is simply “no stock!” (however, note that the article is translated from Chinese, so some nuances may be lost from the original meaning).
The report further notes that last-generation DDR4 RAM has quadrupled in price following the withdrawal of Samsung and most of the other major players from the market, and the contract price for this slower memory has also increased to $18 at the end of last month.
Analysis: no sign of an expected stall in price increases
It’s clear that a serious disruption is in the works, of course, as we’ve seen in the ridiculously steep—well, almost vertical— increase in the price of RAM sticks in retail since the end of September. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed such a rapid increase in prices for any kind of PC component (except perhaps the most advanced GPUs, when inventory was scarce during the crypto craze).
This report from Technowvoice further notes that the hope was that by December 2025 RAM price increases could begin to calm down, and that we could have seen the worst increases during October and November. However, this does not happen; instead we get even more significant increases in prices.
The report also notes that memory manufacturers have nowhere to turn because regardless of whether they make DDR4 or DDR5 RAM, prices have skyrocketed.
In short, system RAM is likely to become even more expensive – as if it wasn’t already expensive enough – and storage suffers a similar fate, to boot.
If you’re thinking about buying DDR4 or DDR5 RAM, the best advice right now seems to be to wait and hope that some of the more pessimistic forecasts – which claim that these price increases could last until 2027, or maybe even longer – turn out to be wrong. But system memory is already priced at insane levels, so buying seems like a foolish move unless you can somehow find a reasonable deal out there. (Storage and SSDs are another matter, especially for budget drives – and you might want to move now or quickly on that front).
The problem is that the cost of RAM doesn’t just affect those building a new PC or upgrading the memory in their existing computer – it will also have a big impact on the price of pre-built devices, and especially laptops.
With this fresh bad news from Samsung, it looks like the situation could be worse than we thought, and the price of both RAM and laptops could be significantly inflated when next year rolls into town. I certainly wouldn’t bet against that happening.
The best SSDs for all budgets
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
