RAM Pricing Is Becoming a Headache—Here's the Remedy

For over 50 years, the memory chip industry has been known for its "boom and bust" cycles. But we have never seen a boom like this: we are entering uncharted waters. RAM prices keep climbing, supply keeps shrinking, and the end of this phase is nowhere in sight. This pricing crisis is becoming a major, industry-wide headache. Luckily, we’ve got the remedy.

An Industry Boom Unlike Any Other

Why is this boom different from the past? There are several reasons, but the most crucial one is AI driving unprecedented demand. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a specialty form of RAM which is primarily used in GPUs. HBM commands very high premiums per wafer, so memory manufacturers are highly motivated to shift production towards this more profitable product. But the problem is much broader than HBM. Data growth and rising memory chip demand have been going on for years.

Traditionally, bit capacity growth has been driven by two primary forces: new fabrication plants coming online and continuous process shrinks that allowed each fab to produce more bits over time. Guided by Moore’s Law, the industry expected capacity to roughly double every 18–24 months. Over the lifetime of a fab, this translates to an 8-16X increase in effective bit output, helping keep pace with rising demand and steadily lowering cost-per-bit.

Memory Innovation Lags Behind

For memory (unlike compute, storage, and networking), this model doesn't hold. RAM technology remains mostly unchanged for over 50 years: it is still based on a 1 Transistor 1 Capacitor (1T1C) cell to hold a single bit of information! Scaling through Moore’s Law drove bit growth per device, but that is stalling. RAM process technology is not scaling.

At the same time, building new memory fabs has become slower, more capital-intensive (~$30B), and increasingly concentrated among a small number of manufacturers. The predictable, self-correcting supply curve that once defined the memory market has broken down. Manufacturers are understandably reluctant to overbuild.

Meanwhile, data growth has accelerated. Modern workloads—from EDA, to simulation, rendering, analytics, AI, and beyond—consume vastly more memory than their predecessors. Datasets are larger, models more complex, and applications consume more memory. The supply and demand gap is widening.

More than a Temporary Glitch

This is why today’s pricing and supply chain challenges should not be mistaken for temporary disruptions. When demand spikes, manufacturers can no longer respond quickly with new capacity. Instead, RAM prices rise, lead times stretch, and customers get forced into inefficient trade-offs.

Given this, industry experts expect that server prices will keep rising sharply as OEMs struggle to protect their margins. This puts customers in a tough spot: if your budget is the same but each server is more expensive, you have to purchase fewer servers or lower-RAM servers—either of which would result in compromised application performance.

MEXT Brings the Remedy

At MEXT, we've been working on the remedy for a while. We’ve developed a software-only solution that enables low-cost flash to effectively function as RAM, reducing dependence on volatile RAM. It requires less than 5 minutes to install and requires no changes to underlying hardware or applications. 

The result? If your budget hasn’t increased, you don’t have to worry about rising server costs. You can go ahead and purchase a lower number of (now price-inflated) servers, or purchase the same number of lower-RAM (cheaper) servers within your budget. Even with this less-than-ideal server purchase plan, you maintain application performance with MEXT-plus-flash functioning as RAM-speed memory. Same budget, and no performance tradeoffs. Try MEXT for free today.