The AI RAM Shortage is Also Driving Up SSD Prices (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0181572556
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/04/11/0539235/the-ai-ram-shortage-is-also-driving-up-ssd-prices
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/tech/908916/ssd-storage-shortages-price-increases
"Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that's available to consumers" — [2]and skyrocketing prices :
> The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since November 2025, and consumer SSDs across the board are seeing similar increases, much like [3]with RAM . The 4TB version of the popular Samsung 990 Pro SSD previously cost $320, but will now run you [4]nearly $1,000 . External SanDisk SSDs saw a [5]200 percent price hike at the Apple Store in March....
>
> According to price trends from PC Part Picker, NVMe SSD prices began ticking upward in December 2025, with prices on 256GB to 4TB SSDs now double or triple what they were just a few months ago, and continuing to climb.
[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/product/sfwypg/western-digital-wd_black-sn850x-wheatsink-2-tb-m2-2280-pcie-40-x4-nvme-solid-state-drive-wds200t2xhe?history_days=180
[2] https://www.theverge.com/tech/908916/ssd-storage-shortages-price-increases
[3] https://www.theverge.com/report/839506/ram-shortage-price-increases-pc-gaming-smartphones
[4] https://pcpartpicker.com/product/RKYmP6/samsung-990-pro-4-tb-m2-2280-pcie-40-x4-nvme-solid-state-drive-mz-v9p4t0bw?history_days=180
[5] https://gizmodo.com/apple-store-prices-for-sandisk-ssds-are-suddenly-astronomical-2000736615
PCPartPicker? Seriously? (Score:2)
Meanwhile, there are 3 dozen other sites selling it for retail.
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon US lists it today for $394. Pretty far cry from 650. Interestingly, they list the regular price at $851.
Just convinces me it's pure profit taking. We live in a society of constant market manipulation, starting first and foremost with the President.
Spinning rust doubled in price! (Score:2)
Not sure if it's just price gouging or actually supply shortage and increase in dram memory cost... But spinning platters are insane at the moment too
Why would a RAM shortage drive up SSD prices? (Score:4, Insightful)
SSD prices have gone up due to demand for SSDs from the AI industry; the demand for them has nothing to do with the shortage in RAM. Who the fuck writes this bullshit and thinks "yeah, that makes sense"? And then who edits it and says "yeah, that makes sense"? And what exactly do /. editors get paid for to read this and go "yeah, that makes sense" before posting it?
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Came here to write that comment.
Not news (Score:2)
The SN850X soared in price months ago. And if you're going to spend this kind of money, at least buy PCIe 5.0.
I've got a nice one I'll sell you! (Score:2)
Just a few hundred bucks!
Soon (Score:1)
We all look forward to the great day when the working man can no longer afford a laptop, most people live in mass poverty and access to drinkable water is a privilege And we will all marvel at the million data centers we built and the AI slop we can produce This is so totally worth it I spread my anus daily and think of the great and wonderful billionaire oligarchs. They are love, they are life
Windows EOL (Score:2)
I bought a couple ~500 gig SSDs last year for upgrading some friends computers from Win10 to Linux. They were under $50. I had a couple more to do recently, and the exact same drives are over $100 now... It's probably the same *cause* as the RAM prices going up: datacenter hype, but it's not *because* of the RAM prices going up. I also am in the market for a new 8TB+ spinning rust drive, which I am kicking myself for not buying last year when they were ~$200. Now they're $400+.
Re: Slowpoke (Score:2)
We hadn't had an AI story for 8 articles so had to add one.
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I cant fathom why we have a shortage of Fabs making this stuff. What's worse, the large orders by AI companies are securing favorable pricing, so we are paying more per gig than they are by huge orders of magnitude.
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Probably because it takes a fair bit of time to build a fab.
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> I cant fathom why we have a shortage of Fabs making this stuff.
There are only a handful of companies that make NAND flash. The main ones are Samsung, SK Group, and Kyoxia. AI companies are 1) buying out all available supply of everything they can. 2) Working deals with these companies to only manufacture their orders. These companies do not have unlimited capacity and building out capacity is years long in the making. So AI gets their products and consumers get whatever is left. The demand for consumer flash has not dropped, just the supply.
probably som scepticism on long-term viability (Score:3)
Also, I could imagine some scepticism on the chipmakers part on whether most current "AI" is a viable business, or if they are mostly driven by investment money with disproportionally less actual revenue coming. If the current "AI" craze has elements of a bubble, chip makers won't hesitate selling to AI companies for inflated prices, but will be far more reluctant investing in capacity that may or may not pay back.
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In a way you can't blame the fabs for being greedy. AI is dangling a lot of money for them to make highly profitable custom parts. Consumer NAND is cutthroat with low margins. The main problem is when the bubble hits, how much the fabs are owed in product they can't sell to anyone else. If they were smart, they got a large portion upfront.
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Memory/flash/hd has historically been boom/bust. So much so that we are down to what 2 hd makers I think and just a few RAM/flash makers. Because in every bust there is consolidation. So I fully expect the suppliers to grab the money while they can, get enough cash cushion to make it thru the next bust so not to be absorbed by a competitor, and if there is cash left over, expand. I am pretty sure I've seen releases that indicate they are all in the expand phase times are so good at the moment. Only so much
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While this is a very reasonable explanation, we don't have reason to believe it's actually true. AI "demand" is a great excuse for profit taking, just as AI is a great excuse to fire staff.
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> While this is a very reasonable explanation, we don't have reason to believe it's actually true. AI "demand" is a great excuse for profit taking, just as AI is a great excuse to fire staff.
Well in this case, why is the price of some of these components very high right now? Firing staff at SK Group, Samsung, or Kyoxia would not explain that. There has been no major disruptions like a natural disaster that would explain it. Tariffs would explain 100% increase in price not the 3-4X increase. At the same time, AI companies have been trying to build (at least fund the building) of AI datacenters.
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so we are paying more per gig than they are by huge orders of magnitude.
One order of magnitude is 10x. "Huge orders" would be more than single digits. So you're claiming that we're paying 10 billion times more or greater.
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"at BK, the lobby attendant runs front-of-house, the register, 'cooks' the burgers, makes the fries, assembles the burger... and front-of-house occasionally has to handle drive-thru"
Sure thing, at every BK.
One person can only do so much work, one person doing all that happens when there is no business. I worked in fast food where I cooked all food AND worked "drive-thru", that was in the 70s and I was paid $1.85 an hour. The rules of physics haven't changed.
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"...we are paying more per gig than they are by huge orders of magnitude."
Citations please.
The usual casual lying by this poster.
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There is no shortage of fabs, no shortage of RAM. There is a shortage of RAM available for purchase at reasonable prices . That's a very different thing.
All it requires is 3 manufacturers deciding, jointly, that the price should rise. They have a documented history of doing this for no reason. But when you give them an excuse - like OpenAI has - to expect anything else would be very strange.
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And an "old" article at that. This was news 5 months ago.
It both cost and demand (Score:2)
> They notice it now? SSD prices are going up for months.
Its not just cost, its also demand:
- Higher RAM costs.
- Higher HDD demand by data centers, retail buyers pushed towards SSD as a result.
- Higher SSD demand by data centers, whose order get fulfilled before retail channels.