When Will It Get Better?
So, the million-dollar question that everyone is asking is, when will this all end? If you’re hoping I’m going to tell you to just wait until the New Year and everything will blow over, then you’re going to be disappointed, and to understand why, we have to look at the history books, because the PC market has a nasty habit of repeating itself.
We all remember the dark days of 2020 to 2022. It was the perfect storm. You had the global pandemic shutting down supply chains, forcing everyone to work from home and to buy new laptops or “work PCs”. At the exact same time, the crypto boom exploded and miners were buying pallets of RTX 30-series cards before they even hit the shelves, and gamers were left fighting over scraps at sometimes triple the MSRP. It took nearly two and a half years for that bubble to finally burst, and that was only because the crypto market crashed and Ethereum moved to Proof of Stake, killing the demand overnight.
Sadly, other areas have historically been affected too. Go back a bit further to 2011. Massive floods in Thailand wiped out the factories that produced the motors for hard drives and almost overnight, the price of mechanical storage tripled, and it didn’t recover for years. Then think about the memory price fixing scandal of 2017 and 2018, where the big three manufacturers were accused of artificially limiting supply to keep prices high. The point is, when hardware prices shoot up, they don’t come down quickly, as they essentially take the elevator up and the stairs back down.
Now the even worse news is that the situation we’re in now is potentially worse than the crypto crash. Crypto was a bubble, while AI is an industrial revolution. The demand from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI isn’t speculative; instead it is structural and they aren’t going to stop building data centres next Tuesday. If anything, their hunger for HBM is increasing rapidly.
Industry analysts are now predicting that this tight supply will last well into late 2026, and possibly bleed into 2027. Remember, you can’t just spin up a new silicon fabrication plant overnight. It takes three to five years and tens of billions of dollars to build a new fab and get it to mass production. Even if Samsung and SK Hynix broke ground on new factories today, we wouldn’t see a single stick of RAM from them until the PlayStation 6 is likely being teased.
On top of that, you have to look at the motivation of the manufacturers. Why would they rush to fix this? For the first time in years, they have immense pricing power. They’re finally making healthy profits after a brutal 2023 and have zero incentive to flood the market with cheap DDR5 and crash their own recovery. They are perfectly content to keep supply tight and prices high, whether you like it or not.
So, in all seriousness, if you’re sitting on a stockpile of cash waiting for prices to drop back to 2023 levels, you might be waiting a very long time. The “new normal” is here, and unfortunately, it comes with a much higher price tag than what you’re used to.
