There aren't any Black Friday deals on RAM this year, and you can thank AI for that

I sat down to write this story hoping to point people to deals on RAM kits for their gaming PC builds, but after an extensive search, I’m sorry to say there aren’t any promotions worth even considering. Sure, if you visit Newegg or Amazon, you’ll find plenty of bundles listed as Black Friday specials, but following a quick visit to PCPartPicker or CamelCamelCamel, you’ll find many of those aren’t deals at all. 

Take this 32GB kit of 6,000MHz DDR5 RAM from G.Skill I found on Newegg. It’s one of the few “good” deals I found, but there’s a catch. It’s listed at $20 off its current $400 MSRP, with an additional $30 off if you use a promo code. To sweeten the deal, Newegg is even throwing in a NZXT all-in-one liquid cooler valued at $160. But here’s the thing, according to PCPartPicker, that same kit cost $155 a couple of months ago. Unless you can make use of the free cooler, you don’t need me to tell you $50 off a RAM kit that used to cost less than half of what it costs now is not a great buy. 

And it’s not just that one set of sticks from G.Skill — nearly every kit of DDR5 RAM I could find has increased in price in recent months. For instance, Amazon has listed this 32GB bundle from Crucial at $322. A little more than a month ago, you could get that same kit for $175. 

If it feels like the pandemic all over again, when it was impossible to buy a GPU at MSRP, you’re not far off the mark. Once again, there’s a component shortage, but this time around, it’s not cryptomining causing an insatiable demand for parts. Instead, it’s the booming AI industry buying up every RAM stick it can for their data center builds. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s been hard to ignore the amount of money that’s been thrown around by NVIDIA, Microsoft and others.  recently. Much of it has been of a seemingly circular nature, but that hasn’t done anything to dent demand for both short and long-term memory. 

The problem is that many of the companies that produce consumer-grade memory, including heavyweights like SK Hynix and Samsung, also make memory for AI servers, and most of the RAM coming off those production lines is going straight to high-volume clients like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, demand for RAM has been so strong that even the price of some DDR4 memory kits has gone up — if you can even find the older format in stock.      

A statement CyberPowerPC posted earlier this week gives a sense of just how dire the situation is right now. “Recently, global memory (RAM) prices have surged by 500 percent and SSD prices have risen by 100 percent,” the company said on X, adding it would be forced to increase the price of its pre-built PCs.

As a consumer, there’s little you can do at the moment. You can either buy now and pay extra, or wait in hopes the price of RAM will stabilize sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, with no signs of the AI boom cooling down in the immediate future, it’s hard to know when things might change. Save a bubble pop, the price of RAM is likely to remain high into early 2026, with the possibility of a trickle effect to SSD and GPU pricing.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/there-arent-any-black-friday-deals-on-ram-this-year-and-you-can-thank-ai-for-that-130000335.html?src=rss