If you were thinking about upgrading your gaming PC with a chunky 64GB of DDR5 RAM, you might want to sit down first. Memory prices have shot up so fast in the past couple of months that a top-tier RAM kit can now cost more than a brand-new PlayStation 5. It’s gotten bad enough that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is publicly sounding the alarm, calling the trend “a real problem for high-end gaming in the coming years.”
Just look at the numbers. Back in mid-October, a 64GB Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 kit could be picked up for around $260. By Black Friday? About $498. No special sale, no limited stock — that’s just the new price. G.Skill’s popular Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB DDR5-6000 kit has seen an even wilder swing: it hit a low of $220 on September 20, and now Newegg lists it for $599, and that’s after a $40 discount.
What’s driving this? It’s mostly the fault of the booming AI industry. Memory suppliers like Samsung and SK hynix have shifted their most advanced manufacturing capacity toward lucrative AI data-center orders — customers who will happily pay much more than gamers ever would. That leaves consumers fighting over whatever capacity is left, pushing prices higher week after week.
And it’s not only RAM feeling the squeeze. Storage is next in line. High-capacity SSDs, HDDs, and even microSD cards are seeing higher price floors and fewer deals, as the same chip fabs try to keep up with datacenter demand.
Some analysts like to suggest an AI bubble could eventually pop and correct things. Sweeney doesn’t sound like he’s counting on that anytime soon. His warning focuses on the next few years — a long stretch where high-end PC gaming might get significantly more expensive simply because memory chip production is shifting away from consumer hardware and toward HBM, which powers AI training and inference.
So if you were planning to grab a big RAM kit to future-proof your rig, the unfortunate reality right now is this: you’re paying PS5 money for a pair of sticks.
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