Lenovo sees a "new normal" for RAM from 2030 onwards with significantly higher prices than pre-crisis levels, "never" going back to pre-crisis pricing

[iamthemilkman]

First off, as German tech site ComputerBase reports (via Wccftech), over at ISC 2026 — the high-performance computing, AI, and quantum conference in Germany — Lenovo said that RAM prices will likely "never" fall back to the pre-crisis levels of a year ago, even after the bolstering of chip production output that's coming (from 2028 onwards).

Lenovo seemingly said "never," accompanied by some on-stage laughter, according to ComputerBase, and the tech site (bearing in mind translation nuances) clarifies that this is really referring to the next five years (or maybe a bit more) for the RAM industry, and not an 'absolute' future.

However, the report then goes on to mention that Lenovo sees a "new normal" from 2030 onwards with significantly higher prices than pre-crisis levels — even given increased production.

Link

 

[Potapota]

I feel like not a day goes by without a "..prices will likely eventually go down but there is no going back what they were" quote on one or two news outlets these days about any given thing.

 

[polter99]

Man, that's so fucked up but what exactly I feared. I upgraded my PC like a year or two before parts rise up, and it took a shitload of time to save for not even a good PC. And I'm basically stuck with 8-fucking- GB of DDR4 in 2026, and my GPU is beyond obsolete.

Such a virtual insanity.

I feel like my best chance would be trading my PS5 for the eventual PS6, and wait for jailbreak to run Linux, or wait for PS5 13.20 Linux exploit... which might as well never happen.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

They are cocky because of the Data Centers and the government contracts.

The bubble will pop at some point, thankfully hardware demanding games aren't even worth the expenditure, so we have it easy to not buy into their game.

No caving to absurd prices, no blackpilling.

 

[Majora Fi]

This is the first time I've seen someone cite "Pre-Crisis" without referring to DC

 

[iamthemilkman]

Thankfully, I bought additional RAM before the prices went crazy, however I held off on larger storage for my PC and now the prices are too high so I'm using an 8TB HDD to store games when not playing. No way I'm paying $600-$1K for a 4TB NVMe.

 

[Boog111]

It's the same for micro SD card pricesas well. They have doubled price or more where I'm at. I've got some good deals online but I can't go to a local store and get any at a reasonable price.

 

[BrawlMan]

Ironic, as I have a Lenovo laptop I got on sale back in 2023. Sure Lenovo, whatever you say. Those higher prices ain't really helping anybody.

 

[Netra]

Don't worry, the Western market is once again handing over a BIG part of consumers to the Chinese market, and in 2-3 years we'll have the market full of clone RAMs and hard drives. They won't be of the same quality at first, but screw the brands that betrayed us.

 

[RandomHajile]

They are cocky because of the Data Centers and the government contracts.

The bubble will pop at some point, thankfully hardware demanding games aren't even worth the expenditure, so we have it easy to not buy into their game.

No caving to absurd prices, no blackpilling.

Yup, and it'll be fun to see them crawling back to PC enthusiasts begging them to take unwanted stock off their hands when investors get tired of AI not returning a profit and scientists suddenly realizing AGI is a pipe dream and AI is nothing more than a chat bot with a metric crap ton of code.

I'm fortunate I built my current rig in the spring of 2025 before this and before the tariffs. That's why I pulled the trigger on it too, the tariffs. Little did I know the RAM-pocalypse would happen thanks to Chat GPT.

 

[egwizard]

We're already kind of seeing the AI market start to fall apart as is... OpenAI are already set to go bankrupt by early next year and possibly even at the end of this year and the CEO is expecting that they'll only be able to turn a profit by like 2030 if they're even able to scrape enough money from investors to stay afloat by then.

Whether the AI companies and RAM-suppliers like it or not, the investors are already leaving in droves because they've been absolutely POURRRING money into AI projects that haven't shown significant profits for 2-3 years now, and no amount of shoehorned-in datacentres and government contracts are gonna fix that fact.

(Sidenote, i'm just praying i'll be able to buy a Steam Machine once it inevitably pops... )

 

[Bakuma1997]

Glad i buy featherweight games and the more heavy ones can still be handled with medium RAM

 

[CraigJarrett]

Lenovo is not customer friendly and they don't feel they need to be, the have an alternative market who they supply so shutting out the regular Joe is not skin off their nose.

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

Riot wen, though?