Building a PC or buying electronic components for your devices is becoming more expensive. A 32-gigabyte Corsair computer memory kit cost $52 on Amazon's US page in June 2025. By September 2026, the same kit was selling for $250, an increase of about 380 per cent.
And it is not only RAM that is affected. An analysis by The National of Amazon US prices for 18 popular memory and storage products found that every one had risen by between 85 per cent and 553 per cent. A Crucial 1TB SSD (Solid State Drive) went from $100 to $392, while a Corsair DDR5 memory kit, used in many newer gaming PCs, jumped from $125 to $550.
For years, building your own PC from scratch gave some users much-needed control over performance and price. One could spend more on the parts that mattered, keeping those that still worked and upgrading over time. However, rising component prices are making that harder, as much of the process is enabled by memory and storage chips.
The reason behind this? The AI industry is becoming insatiably reliant on memory chips. Many are calling the surging cost phenomeonon 'chipflation'. Manufacturers that supply everyday consumer electronics are increasingly serving the AI industry, whose biggest customers are committing billions of dollars to new computing capacity.
Why does AI need so much memory?
Two types of chips are causing prices to soar; both are sought after by consumers and the artificial intelligence industry. DRAM provides the working memory that computers and phones use to run applications. NAND flash stores files in SSDs, memory cards and other devices.
AI infrastructure needs both. One particularly valuable product is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, which supplies data to the powerful processors running AI models. HBM chips are a specialised form of DRAM. And now manufacturers must decide how to divide production capacity and investment between products. Larger AI contracts and long-term pay cheques are giving memory makers a strong incentive to prioritise AI needs over consumer products. The consultancy group Bain says the shift is already “worsening shortages and raising the prices of smartphones and PCs”. The five largest cloud companies could spend $780 billion on infrastructure this year, nearly five times the amount they did three years ago. HBM chip sales have risen from about $4 billion in 2023 to an estimated $77 billion this year.
This, in turn, has reversed years of falling prices in the industry. Even hard drives, which store data on spinning disks rather than on memory chips, have become more expensive since 2023.
Feeding the AI demand
In October 2025, OpenAI announced partnerships with Samsung and SK Hynix for its Stargate data centre initiative, outlining plans targeting up to 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month. This represented future demand and capacity expansion, rather than memory immediately removed from the consumer market. A month later, Samsung raised prices for some memory chips by as much as 60 per cent compared with September. The pressure became apparent at the retail level almost immediately.
We analysed Keepa data, which tracks historical prices across most Amazon.com products. What we found was that Amazon.com had Corsair’s DDR5 kit available for only 11 to 21 per cent of the time between November 2025 and February 2026, compared with availability throughout the previous summer.
In the UAE, 11 of 14 storage products tracked on Sharaf DG’s website were listed as out of stock on October 1, including every internal SSD in the sample.
"Memory manufacturers are allocating more production capacity towards high-margin server products, including the memory required for AI infrastructure. The capacity continues to move towards server applications, leaving less available for conventional PC DRAM," Kevin Sebastian, a creative director and technology commentator in the UAE, tells The National.
"Storage is being squeezed too NAND flash is the technology behind SSDs, USB storage and many memory cards, and it has experienced its own sharp price increases."
Is building your own PC still cheaper?
For decades, gamers, video editors, and other demanding users have often chosen each computer component separately to tailor their computers to their needs. Replacing individual parts can also extend their computers' lives.
But the savings depend on what those parts cost. Large PC manufacturers may have some protection through existing contracts, while individual builders pay current retail prices.
That raises the possibility that a pre-built computer could offer better value than an equivalent machine assembled from parts purchased separately. This, of course, will still depend on the specifications, the retailer and when the components were bought. Higher RAM and SSD prices alone do not establish that building a PC is now more expensive in every case. The same calculation applies to people trying to extend the life of an older machine. An upgrade may still cost less than a replacement computer, but rising component prices can narrow the savings. Consumers may consequently spend more, accept lower specifications or hold on to devices longer.
Which is what PC builders in the UAE are going through now - and the figures are eye-watering and budget-busting.
UAE builders' 'big budget problem'
During the first half of 2025, a decent 32GB DDR5-6000 kit could be bought anywhere from Dh400 and Dh500 in the UAE, while archived search results on Amazon UAE show several 32GB DDR5 kits at Dh400 to Dh520, according to data compiled by Kevin Sebastian, a creative director and technology commentator in the UAE. A Dubai gaming community PC build from April 2025 listed a Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5 kit at Dh449.
Today, prices are unrecognisable: current listings show 32GB DDR5 modules and kits exceeding Dh2,000, including a Kingston Fury Beast 32GB DDR5-6000 module at around Dh2,250. And while some higher-end Kingston kits have been listed above Dh3,000 on sites such as Microless and Amazon, it is still possible to get them at a lower price, but they are few and far between, and are still well about Dh2,000. Even prices for made-for-the-masses SD cards have jumped: a SanDisk Extreme 256GB microSD card currently sits around Dh190 to Dh280, compared to Dh120 to Dh150 a year earlier.
"That’s just how distorted the market has become ... a component that could comfortably occupy less than 10 per cent of a mid-range gaming PC budget last year can now consume a much larger share of it," Mr Sebastian tells The National.
Graphic cards have also been hit, primarily because each one carries several gigabytes of fast memory. Prices of GDDR6 and GDDR7 chips used in graphics cards rose by several hundred per cent within months of AI data centres absorbing supply.
The effect is starkest at the top end. Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 was launched in January 2025 at $1,999. By July 2026 it was listed at about $4,329 on Amazon US, more than double. In the UAE, some RTX 5090 listings now range from Dh25,000 to Dh30,000,
"Imagine a retailer bought a shipment of RAM at Dh400 per kit; normally it could add its margin and sell those kits relatively cheaply. If replacing that inventory now costs Dh1,200 or Dh1,500, selling the remaining stock at the old price makes much less financial sense," Mr Sebastian says.
"Retailers therefore have to decide whether to increase prices immediately, reduce margins or risk being unable to restock the product. That is one reason consumers can see enormous differences between shops and even between two models with very similar specifications."
Who benefits, and what happens next?
Meanwhile, some chipmakers are reporting record earnings. Micron reported quarterly revenue of $54.2 billion, about 4.8 times the level a year earlier. Its operating margin climbed from 32 per cent to almost 81 per cent.
Samsung’s memory business also reported strong profits, even as its mobile phone division recorded its first operating loss, partly linked to rising component costs.
Investors have rewarded the chipmakers even more. Shares in SanDisk, spun off from Western Digital in February 2025, have risen almost 38 times since the end of June 2025. Kioxia's shares are up about 20 times. Both specialise in the NAND chips used for storage.
Meanwhile, IDC expects global PC shipments to fall 11.3 per cent this year and average prices to rise 18.3 per cent. That average reflects both prices and the mix of computers sold. Some SSD prices have eased from their highs, but expanding supply takes time. Deloitte estimates new factories may not add meaningful capacity until 2029 or 2030.
Bain's report goes on to describe the market shift as “structural, not cyclical”. That does not mean prices cannot fall, but it raises a longer-term question about whom manufacturers build their capacity for. For now, an industry racing to build the next generation of AI is making some everyday technology more expensive to maintain.
