Why RAM and SSD Prices Climbed Through 2026

If you went to add memory to a computer this year and thought the price tag was a typo, it wasn't. RAM got expensive in 2026. So did SSDs.

The reason isn't complicated. The handful of companies that make memory chips pointed their best production capacity at AI servers, and the consumer market got whatever was left.

How steep was it

Memory gets sold on contract, and the analysts at TrendForce track those contract prices quarter by quarter. Their January forecast for the first quarter of 2026 called for a 55 to 60 percent jump in conventional DRAM contract prices. Server DRAM was expected to climb more than 60 percent. NAND flash, which is what's inside every SSD and memory card, was pegged at 33 to 38 percent. All of that in a single quarter.

The explanation was that suppliers shifted their newest manufacturing capacity toward server memory and the high-bandwidth memory that AI accelerators need, which squeezed supply everywhere else. You can read the January forecast here.

It's easing, but it hasn't reversed

By summer the pace had slowed. TrendForce's third-quarter outlook puts conventional DRAM at 13 to 18 percent and NAND at 10 to 15 percent for the quarter. Still climbing. Just not at the pace that made headlines back in February.

Part of what slowed it down is people simply stopping. Buyers hit an affordability ceiling, PC and phone demand softened, and long-term supply agreements locked some pricing in place. Prices didn't come down. The rate of increase did. Those are very different things, and it's easy to read the second as the first.

Statistics Canada caught it too

This showed up in our own inflation numbers. Statistics Canada's May 2026 Consumer Price Index reported that prices for computer equipment, software and supplies rose 3.9 percent year over year, after a 0.2 percent decline the month before. StatCan named the cause directly: RAM and SSD prices are up, and demand from artificial intelligence data centres plus limited production capacity are behind it.

A category that spent most of a decade quietly getting cheaper started getting more expensive, and it landed in the national inflation basket.

What it changes around here

For anyone buying or selling computer gear in Kamloops, Kelowna, Vernon or anywhere else in the Interior, a few things shifted.

• Old machines aren't disposable anymore. A six-year-old desktop with 32 GB of RAM and a working SSD in it has real parts value now, even if the machine itself feels slow.
• Upgrading beats replacing more often than it used to. Adding storage or memory to what you already own is still the cheaper path, but the gap narrowed.
• Spare parts in a drawer are worth listing. Sticks of RAM pulled from an old build, a drive you swapped out two years ago and never got rid of. Those move now.
• Sellers are asking more, and often getting it. If a used price looks high next to what you remember paying, check what the equivalent new part costs today before you assume someone's gouging you.

Buying used without getting burned

Higher prices pull in people who cut corners, so a bit of care goes further than it did two years ago.

• Ask for a photo of the label on the actual part, not a stock image pulled off the internet.
• Ask for a screenshot of the system information screen showing the part installed and recognized by the computer.
• Test before money changes hands. Boot the machine, let it sit for a few minutes, copy a large file onto the drive and back off it.
• Be skeptical of storage priced well under everything else listed that week. Faked capacity on drives and memory cards is an old trick, and it comes back every time real prices climb.

Selling into it

If you're on the selling side, the market is friendlier than it's been in years. Put the exact spec in your listing: capacity, speed, generation, and the model number printed on the part itself. Photograph that label. Say honestly how long it ran and what machine it came out of. Vague listings sit for weeks. Specific ones sell.

And wipe anything with storage in it before it leaves your hands. We walked through how to do that properly in this guide.

Nobody can say exactly when memory pricing settles down. The data centre buildouts are still running, and new fabrication capacity takes years to come online, not months. For now, the old hardware sitting in your closet is worth more than it was, and that's not the worst news for a marketplace built on local resale.