AI data centers have caused an unprecedented shortage of RAM and SSDs, increasing prices on everything from computers to smartphones.
I can comfortably say this as someone with no NEED to purchase RAM or SSD’s.
Just don’t buy. For people like myself who only really need these things for recreation use, just set expectations lower for the next year or so. We don’t need to upgrade for the newest games. Those will still be there once prices become less insane.
Although my hunch is that this will take 2–3 years for supply chains to go back to a normal state. And even then, I doubt prices will ever return to prior levels as profit margins will be too juicy once production costs trend down.
I’m sure there’ll be some holiday sales, but I’m also sure stock will be scarce.
I was going to upgrade some of my PC over the New Year, but I’ve also got about 10 books I’m halfway though. So I’ll just read more and play less demanding games.
I feel for people in the Video or Rendering business though, especially if they use a personal machine.
There is nothing actionable right now in the side of manufacturers, just like in the Covid era with the GPU shortages.
You can try junkyards for cheap parts if you have them near you. But that needs certain frequency in visiting and I doubt if anyone has the time.
You can buy second hand parts in ebay. Its a risk but even the resellers are increasing in prices.
I think the best anyone can do right now is to personally visit shops and offices that are closing and maybe try to buy their computers for cheap. You can also score good cheap branded Herman Miller office chairs at the same time.
Unfortunately the getting scraps part isn’t gonna work, the one pc at my work laying around has DDR3, not DDR5 RAM and as someone who looked forward to doing a pc upgrade for under 1000 [7500X3D, 16/32 GB DDR5 and 9060 XT (or Arc B580 I’ve yet to decide on it) getting from scraps especially ddr5 is simply not viable
Same with @_TrustyRocinante, Not buying is an option but it will not be viable for many people in the long term, what if all of the sudden the DDR5 PC’s memory fail, are you going to until like end of 2026 or 2027 without a PC? Or would you go digging online for a good enough or okay single ddr5 stick to beer until the shortage ends? I would pick the second option personally
What about people looking to buy the steam machine, the PS5[In the long term] etc.?
This is the problem with arguments like this
Luckily, I also don’t need to upgrade my PC. My friend was looking to upgrade his RAM last year, and I told him he already has 32GB. If we knew there would be RAM shortages, I would have told him he should buy more RAM. And I had a student come up to me saying he was looking to build his own PC, but now he can’t because RAM prices have made it less affordable. Would’ve never thought I would tell someone not to build a PC.
Yeah it is unfortunate
Very worst case if your friend does have his ram failing, if it’s DDR5, mostly SOL (I say mostly because Maybe you can buy a single stick for under 100 bucks if desperate but if not for that basically SOL)
if it’s DDR3/DDR4 you could get by finding some of these sticks in your local e-waste center (sticks or rather through a old computer) and use them until the shortage is over and if not, also above or SOL
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but would RAM shortages lead to more Linux users? If Microsoft insists on throwing away old hardware if they can’t upgrade to Windows 11 and they drop support for Windows 10 at a time where there’s RAM shortage, wouldn’t Linux be even more enticing?
My friend did have one RAM failed years ago and luckily I had a spare. I don’t have any to spare now, but it is DDR4.
Unfortunately it’s worse
As you said one of your other buddies wanted to get into building a PC but due to ram shortage it is out of reach, well how is that buddy going to get into PC Gaming with Linux (eg. Bazzite, CachyOS)?
Btw for those looking if May offer the alternative:
You can think of it like a steam frame kind of gaming (not the same but similar), maybe combine it with a separated from personal things gaming phone like Redmagic and iQOO and you are for the most part that is getting into pc gaming just indirectly and with the performance or like varying of approx. AMD Radeon 680M to 1060 3GB somewhere around here depending on the SoC/Model
I meant for those who already have a decent PC that’s not compatible with Windows 11. For people who are looking to build a PC, yeah, it’s worse for them.
Oh in the ladder I have to agree. It can make Linux as a very attractive offer
I mean in fact, Bazzite just got 2PB Traffic downloads recently which for say around the 10GB download of the iso, that equates to around millions of gamers with most of the traffic coming from windows. If you saw my post that is
There is not much you can do except wait out the storm and make the best use of what you have or what you might be able to get from your community or surplus. The attitude must meet the moment. Otherwise you are simply trying to find deals and will be paying a premium for the forseeable future.
I guess I won’t be buying a badass TrueNAS beefy server with 96 GB of ECC memory in January, indeed. 
Sometimes there are ways to make better use of what you already have.
Zswap uses CPU time to compress memory. That should save on RAM.
ZFS compression using lz4 transparently shrinks on-disk file sizes, and it is great for QEMU-KVM’s QCOW2 virtual disks. I have never used it, but I think I read that BTRFS offers a similar compression feature. That should save on SSDs / hard disks.