# DDR4 Price Spike: A Supply Chain Story How AI demand for high\-bandwidth memory pulled wafer capacity away from older DDR4 RAM, and why its price jumped in 2025 and 2026\. By curious\-moon\-0aba9cca Topic: Society & Business [Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/zDdsXbfOdHYo) ## Transcript ### 1. A stick of old memory This green board is a DDR4 memory stick, the kind of RAM that went into home computers from 2014 on\. RAM is a computer's short\-term memory: it holds what the computer is working on right now\. In 2025 and 2026 the price of these old sticks shot up\. Let's follow why\. A desktop DDR4 stick is about 13 cm long, with 288 gold contacts along its edge\. ### 2. Memory starts as a wafer Every memory chip is cut from a thin disc of silicon called a wafer, about 30 cm across\. Each little square on it becomes one chip\. Factories can only make so many wafers each month, and just three companies, Samsung, SK hynix and Micron, make about 90 percent of the world's memory\. The green slice stands for wafers used to make DDR4\. Slice sizes are drawn to explain, not measured\. ### 3. AI wants a special memory AI computers in data centers need huge amounts of very fast memory\. So chip makers stack eight or more memory chips into a tiny tower called HBM, short for High Bandwidth Memory\. The towers sit right beside the AI processor, so data has only a short trip\. The blue tower is shown about six times bigger than a real one, which is about 1 cm wide\. The real ones sit on the processor in front of it\. ### 4. HBM eats more of the wafer To store the same amount of data, HBM uses roughly three times as much wafer as ordinary memory\. As data centers bought more and more, the blue HBM slice grew\. Every wafer used for HBM is a wafer that cannot become anything else\. Industry estimates: about 18 percent of memory wafers went to HBM at the end of 2025, and about 22 percent in 2026\. ### 5. Factories say goodbye to DDR4 With wafers so valuable, the makers chose to stop building old DDR4 and use their factories for newer, more profitable memory\. In 2025 Samsung, SK hynix and Micron announced plans to wind down most DDR4 production\. Watch the green DDR4 slice shrink\. The slice sizes show the trend, not exact shares\. ### 6. The price dial jumps Lots of older computers, factory machines and cameras still need DDR4, because the newer kinds do not fit their slots\. When people want something that is being made less and less, its price climbs\. Press the button to run the clock through 2025 and into 2026\. Each big tick is one more times the old price\. Some DDR4 chip prices rose about six times in a year; memory kits in shops often more than doubled\. ### 7. Why old RAM got hit hardest Old DDR4 was squeezed from both sides: fewer factories making it, and steady demand from machines that still need it\. The AI boom never used DDR4 itself; it used up the wafers and factory time\. Prices may ease as new factories open, but some experts expect memory to stay costly into 2027\.