You know that the price of RAM is something that tends to fluctuate over time. There have been times when it had almost absurd prices and there have been other situations – recently, in fact – in which its price had dropped so much that it was an ideal time to buy and improve or expand the memory capacity of the PC. Now we are again in a situation that, although far from worrying, its price is again increasing.
Why does RAM continue to rise in price?
That a couple of days ago there was a fire in a Samsung DRAM factory in China it is not enough reason for the price increase. In fact, in addition to the fact that the fire was mild and stifled without causing major evils, this increase in the price of chips RAM It has been gradual during the first quarter of the year, that is, there has been no event that has caused stocks to explode and increase their price.
There are many problems that are happening in the factories of Asia in recent times; We all know that Coronavirus is not making things easy in China lately. Analysts do blame the virus that the price has increased more than expected (expected a 5% rise, but in the end it was 10% and, eye to data, 20% in memory for servers).
The reason that analysts give is that, in addition to what has already been mentioned, there has been a strong demand and manufacturers are seeing their inventories empty and they are not being able to make chips at the same rate they sell them. In the case of servers, they have indicated that demand in recent months has doubled and not only in 32 and 64 GB RAM modules, but also in 128 GB, the maximum capacity currently manufactured.
The price goes up, but it won't shoot
However we can be calm. That the price fluctuates is common and a 10% rise in a quarter is not something that should worry us, since it was expected to rise and it has simply been a slightly higher rise than expected. In any case, the market price of RAM has not shot up nor is it going to, so it is still a good time to buy RAM – maybe not as good as a couple of months ago, but still good – because Its price is still "cheap."
We can see it in the evolution of the price of memory kits DDR4-3000 MHz RAM (2 × 8 GB), which are the best sellers so far (graph from PCPartPicker).
We can see that by September 2018 the price was almost skyrocketing, but from there and until the summer of 2019 the price has only gone down. In December 2019 it reached its minimum, and from there until now it has experienced a slight increase (there we find that 10% increase), but it is really slight. The trend is that it continues to rise until at least half of this year, but again we emphasize that we can rest easy because there is no forecast that its price will skyrocket and return to 2018 values.
