- Intense demand for AI hardware and persistent supply chain bottlenecks, beginning in late 2025, have triggered a severe spike in memory component costs.
- The hardware inflation has expanded from memory modules to graphics cards, with South Korean market data showing weekly price jumps of up to 21% between July 31 and August 6, 2026.
- If these rising costs persist, high-end PC components will become increasingly unaffordable for gamers.
The memory price crisis surge arrived in late October and early November 2025, making market conditions worse. This was largely due to AI demand and an increasingly strained supply chain; memory shortages began pushing prices sharply higher. The increase in prices initially hit RAM and NAND flash, making SSD prices surge, but the impact has now spread to GPUs as well, with recent price comparisons from South Korea showing increases of 10% to 20% in just a single week.
Owning a computer nowadays is much more expensive than they were a year or two ago, due to the high cost of memory. If you remember a year ago, 32GB of DDR5 RAM cost a little over $100, but it now costs $400 or more.
AI has also boosted the cost of SSDs, with what used to cost $100 now costing nearly twice as much. With only these two components, we’re already paying more for a computer, but that’s not all. If we look at GPU prices in South Korea from Danawa, we see huge price spikes between July 31st and August 6th, 2026, which are not coincidental.
The price increase has affected all current-generation GPUs and is likely to affect last-generation GPUs as well. Starting with the RTX 5090, we see a 5.4% price increase in one week, followed by the RTX 5080, which increased somewhat higher at 6.4%.
Moving on to the RTX 5070 Ti, we see a 7.7% increase, while the RTX 5070 witnessed a 12.9% increase, a record for NVIDIA. The 8GB RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060 had the next biggest increases, at 11.8% each.
Furthermore, we have the AMD RX 9070 XT, which has seen a 6.1% price increase in just one week. The RX 9070, which grew little more than 1%, is followed by the RX 9070 GRE, which increased by less than 3%. The RX 9060 grew by less than 5%, but the RX 9060 XT increased by 11.5% for the 16GB version and 21.2% for the 8GB version, making it the most expensive of all.
Whether the increase in prices is caused by demand driven by AI or supply constraints, it puts consumers in a difficult position to purchase with such high prices. If this trend of increasing prices continues, the latest GPUs may become even less accessible to Gamers and PC enthusiasts.
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[Editor-in-Chief]
Sajjad Hussain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tech4Gamers.com. Apart from the Tech and Gaming scene, Sajjad is a Seasonal banker who has delivered multi-million dollar projects as an IT Project Manager and works as a freelancer to provide professional services to corporate giants and emerging startups in the IT space.
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