These days, Lao Hu’s computer hard drive space is running out. He looked at a slot on the motherboard for an M.2 solid-state drive that was still empty, so he thought of adding a high-capacity solid-state drive to his computer.
At that time, the idea was to start with 2T. If the price was awesome, it would not be impossible to directly set up a 4T. After all, it was over two years ago when I last bought a solid-state product. I bought a 2T one at that time, and now that I have used it, there is very little space left.
Due to the good performance of the solid-state product I purchased at the time and the lack of any issues in the past two years, I decided to buy back the same model. Therefore, I specifically went to JD.com to retrieve the purchase link from two years ago.
As soon as the link opened, the sky collapsed! I bought a 2T solid-state drive for 478 yuan back then, but now it costs 1199 yuan!
What’s going on here? When did solid-state drives skyrocket like this?
I thought Apple’s storage capacity was already expensive enough. Taking iPhone 17 as an example, the starting price for 256GB is 5999 yuan, while the 512GB one is 7999 yuan. In other words, the 256GB storage capacity at Apple is worth 2000 yuan!
As for the running memory on Mac, it’s even more so. 8GB is worth 1500 yuan, and 16GB costs 3000 yuan! This is already quite outrageous, but I didn’t expect that there are still experts nowadays. A 2TB solid-state drive has skyrocketed from 478 yuan to 1199 yuan!
Previously, everyone joked that Apple’s memory and storage were made of gold.
Compared to traditional solid-state drives and memory, Apple’s storage is indeed expensive. After all, the essence of solid-state drives and memory is NAND flash memory chips and DRAM chips, both of which are mature technologies with low costs. It is unfair for Apple to sell them at such a high price.
But looking at the 2T solid-state drive that I bought for 478 yuan back then now rising to 1199, and many 4TB capacity drives being directly out of stock or taken down, my intuition tells me that there must be something wrong here.
Nowadays, the prices of memory and solid-state drives are soaring, and they are really catching up with gold. The phrase used to mock Apple is gradually becoming a reality!
At present, the price of 32GB DDR5 memory on e-commerce platforms such as JD.com is generally around 1300-1500 yuan. It should be noted that in mid September, the price was only a little over 700 yuan, and within two months, the price increase even exceeded 100%.
According to the latest news, storage giants such as Samsung and SK Hynix have confirmed that DRAM and NAND flash memory prices will increase by up to 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025;
What’s even more shocking is that the spot price of DRAM in September surged nearly three times year-on-year, and DDR4 was even more expensive than DDR5 at one point. If this continues, the price of memory is really comparable to gold.
How exaggerated is this reflected in the retail market? Now it’s a daily price, the morning quote may expire in the afternoon, “said a boss who has been engaged in memory business in Huaqiangbei to Lao Hu for a long time!
The last time I remember such a surge in memory and flash memory was in 2018, when major players such as Samsung and Micron collectively reduced production and restricted shipments.
So what is the reason for this round of skyrocketing memory?
In fact, it is still fundamentally caused by the imbalance between memory supply and demand, but the culprit this time is not the upstream giants, but the currently popular AI artificial intelligence.
Many people may think that training AI models should consume the most computing power, right? What does it have to do with memory?
In fact, for the training and inference of generative AI models, computing power is only one aspect, and it also has a high demand for memory. What’s even more deadly is training AI models, which doesn’t use ordinary memory because the bandwidth of ordinary memory is too small to meet the massive data throughput of AI models. It requires high bandwidth HBM memory, and this large AI server also requires 3 to 8 times more memory than ordinary servers and PCs.
This directly led to a surge in the demand for HBM memory in a short period of time. Faced with this huge cake, storage giants such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron naturally won’t let it go easily, so they have allocated more production capacity to HBM memory. After all, the profit and demand of HBM memory far exceed that of DDR4 and DDR5 memory.
In this way, the production of civilian grade DDR4 and DDR5 memory has decreased, and it is not surprising that prices have skyrocketed due to scarcity. In addition, there are a very small number of unscrupulous merchants taking advantage of the situation to hoard and hoard, which has made the already rising memory prices even more outrageous.
Similar to the situation with DRAM memory, there are also NAND flash memory chips used for solid-state drives, because large AI servers also rely on massive storage space. Feedback to the consumer end has led to the magical phenomenon mentioned by Lao Hu at the beginning of the article, where 2TB hard drives cost less than 500 yuan and have increased in price to 1200 yuan.
Of course, the price increase of NAND flash memory has affected not only computers, but also the mobile phone market.
The price difference between different memory versions of the Redmi K90 series released in October has significantly widened.
The standard version 16+256GB is priced at 2899 yuan, while the 1 6+512GB version is priced at 3499 yuan, with a price difference of up to 600 yuan. You should know that in the past, the price difference between 256G and 512G was usually only about 300 yuan.
If we compare 12+256GB and 16+512GB, the price difference is even higher at 900 yuan. It can be seen that for products like mobile phones that require both DRAM memory and NAND flash memory, the impact of skyrocketing storage chip prices is clearly greater.
Xiaomi Group President Lu Weibing publicly responded, “We cannot change the trend of the global supply chain, and the increase in storage costs is much higher than expected and will continue to intensify
Lei Jun also bluntly stated on Weibo, “The increase in memory prices is too much.” Even the two big shots said so, and as consumers, we may have no choice but to accept all of this.
The question is, how long will this new round of memory price increases last? As consumers, should we continue to wait for the party or seize the opportunity to start now? Will the price of storage chips fall in the future?
This time, the party may be disappointed… Based on current industry analysis, the possibility of a price drop in the short term is unlikely. Major storage vendors have confirmed that prices for DRAM and NAND flash memory will increase by up to 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Some analysts believe that this AI driven ‘super cycle’ will have a deeper and longer impact than ever before. Authoritative institutions such as TrendForce also predict that the price increase trend of storage products may continue until 2026.
This is still a relatively optimistic prediction. With the booming development of the AI industry and the emergence of emerging industries, the demand for memory and storage is expected to continue for a long time, or even continue to grow, once computing power is basically met. It is unlikely that the prices of both memory and solid-state drives will return to low levels in the short term.
In short, the recent surge in memory prices is indeed different from previous ones. Similar to the wave of skyrocketing memory prices in 2018, it is more due to deliberate speculation by upstream manufacturers, and even bottlenecks and capacity limitations, artificially creating a situation of supply shortage.
You may still remember that in those years, you could always see in the news of the technology industry which supplier’s factory caught fire today, and which factory would experience a power outage or wafer contamination tomorrow.
But this time, it is not just a simple market hype behavior, behind it is the profound reshaping of the global supply chain brought by the AI technology revolution.
This kind of influence far exceeds temporary market speculation. Correspondingly, the price of storage chips will also remain high for a longer period of time.
For users who do not have rigid requirements for memory and solid-state drives, Lao Hu suggests holding onto their coins and watching. The current price is too high, and buying now is clearly a cut from the market. As for smartphones, if 256GB is enough, the impact is not significant. If 512GB is not too expensive, it can also be considered.
People like Lao Hu who hoarded several 2T and 4T solid-state drives last year can only enjoy themselves secretly. Don’t envy them too much~
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