- A new report from TrendForce gives us some optimistic nuggets of information about the RAM crisis
- Retail prices seem to be falling in the US, Europe and especially in China right now
- The bigger picture hasn’t changed much, though, according to memory chip makers, but we can still hope this is the start of a turnaround—at least for consumers
If you were hoping for some good news on RAM prices, there are some glimmers of light on the horizon – although of course we’d be very foolish to get carried away with any optimism.
VideoCardz spotted various positive signals, mainly coming from the analyst firm TrendForce, which has a new report (based on a lot of sources) about how RAM prices are now falling.
That includes recent observations we’ve already reported on, such as the German retail market seeing a 7% drop in DDR5 RAM price tags in March (which was replicated elsewhere in Europe). The report notes that this is also reflected elsewhere, namely in the US and Chinese retail markets, where it is happening in an even more pronounced way.
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Wccftech recently stated that a Corsair 32GB DDR5 RAM kit had dropped in price by 20% in e.g. US, and in China 16GB sticks of DDR5 have fallen by something like 25% to 30% since reaching peak prices in January to February (this is on “local e-commerce platforms”).
32GB kits in China are also down 15% or more, we’re told, and Harukaze5719 on X points to a drop of the equivalent of $15 over the past weekend, noting: “The market is in turmoil as prices have dropped sharply in just one or two days.”
And to top it all off, we’re told that spot prices have fallen sharply in one of Shenzhen’s major electronics trading hubs, with 32GB RAM modules dropping in price by as much as a third in some cases.
Part of the reason this is happening is that consumers look at now skyrocketing RAM prices – which despite the noted drops are still ridiculously expensive, certainly in the US and Europe – and just refuse to buy. This is an inevitable ‘softening’ of consumer demand, as TrendForce puts it.
In the bigger picture in terms of technological development, we also have Google’s TurboQuant, which reduces the memory requirements imposed by AI. And as Hardware Canucks points out at X, Sam Altman has reportedly backed off on big RAM purchase announcements previously made for OpenAI, and that lines up well with the company scaling back its ambitions on several fronts (also remember the recent Sora pullout).
Analysis: a welcome decline in retail sales
So what to make of all this?
On the one hand, TrendForce notes by Bai Wenxi, vice chairman of the China Enterprise Capital Alliance and chief economist for the China region (via Chinastarmarket.cn): “Looking further ahead, he expected the structural imbalance between supply and demand to gradually ease, with DDR5 16GB module prices potentially normalizing by the end of 2026.”
That will presumably refer to the Chinese market, and no other forecast says that RAM prices will stabilize this year – at all. Even the brighter predictions say that this will not happen until 2027 at the earliest (and many are counting on 2028, and others still believe that normalization will not happen until the end of the decade).
Additionally, TrendForce makes it clear that Taiwan-based memory chipmakers “broadly maintain strict pricing discipline,” so their profits aren’t falling meaningfully (yet). TrendForce says: “Contract prices have so far held firm and demand for HBM and server-side DRAM has remained largely intact, with major vendors reportedly locked into multi-year deals with key customers.”
This appears to be primarily a drop in actual retail prices – although that’s obviously good news for consumers, even if the big RAM hoovers out there on the commercial side aren’t getting much of a break.
The report concludes: “Overall, the current DDR5 price correction appears to be a consumer-driven, short-term adjustment rather than a definitive signal of a structural demand deterioration.”
Still, I’ll take it, and there are quite a few flurries of more optimistic predictions here, which are certainly welcome compared to the general very negative sentiment surrounding memory price increases. As always, we have to watch the coming months and keep our fingers crossed that retail prices continue on this downward track.
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