The RAM Shortage Isn't Ending Soon — Should You Buy Now or Wait?

Quick Verdict: Buy the RAM you need now. Every credible forecast has this shortage running well past 2027, several run it to 2030, and the trend within 2026 itself has been prices getting worse, not better. There is no version of "wait for it to drop" backed by an actual timeline right now.

This Isn't the Story You Already Heard

If you've been half-following this, you know DDR5 prices roughly doubled over the past year or so — a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that ran under $90 in early 2025 is now averaging around $529. That part of the story is old news at this point. The actual question worth answering isn't "why did prices spike" — it's how long does this last, and does buying now versus buying in six months actually change the math.

Short answer: waiting doesn't have a payoff date attached to it. Here's why.

What the Forecasters Are Actually Saying

We pulled from several independent forecasts rather than one source, because the range itself tells you something:

  • Gartner's "memflation" report places the end of the shortage in H2 2027 — the most optimistic mainstream estimate we found.
  • Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has said the shortage should last through 2027, with supply gradually improving into 2028.
  • wccftech's roundup of supplier guidance puts memory shortages — DDR5 and DDR4 — lasting until at least Q4 2027, with 2027 pricing expected to be higher throughout the year than 2026, not lower.
  • Kearney's PERLab analysis (published 2026) is the outlier on the pessimistic end, projecting the shortage lasting at least until 2030.
  • SK Hynix's CEO went further, stating publicly that customer demand is expected to outpace manufacturing capacity even beyond 2030.

Averaging analyst opinions is usually a fool's errand, but the pattern here doesn't need averaging — every single forecast we found has the earliest realistic relief in late 2027, and the more recent the report, the more likely it pushes the timeline further out rather than pulling it in. AppleInsider's headline from earlier this month put it bluntly: the RAM supply crisis is going to get worse before it gets better.

Why This Is Structural, Not a Bottleneck

The distinction matters. A bottleneck implies a temporary constraint that clears once a fab comes online or a backlog works through. What's actually happening is different: AI infrastructure now consumes roughly 20% of total global DRAM production, and manufacturers are making a deliberate, durable business decision to steer wafer capacity toward HBM (the memory standard used in AI accelerators) instead of consumer DDR5 — because HBM contract prices are climbing even faster and the margins are structurally better for Samsung and SK Hynix.

That's not a supply chain hiccup working itself out. That's the memory industry permanently reallocating capacity toward a more profitable customer. Consumer DRAM isn't being under-supplied by accident; it's being deprioritized on purpose.

Even the Optimistic Case Doesn't Mean Cheap

Here's the detail that gets lost: even in Gartner's H2 2027 best-case scenario, "shortage ends" doesn't mean "prices go back to 2024 numbers." Multiple analysts we reviewed explicitly note that a return to $80–$100 territory for a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit is considered unlikely before 2027 at the absolute earliest — and most read that as the floor of a new, permanently higher price plateau rather than a temporary peak. Current retail reality backs this up: entry-level 32GB DDR5 kits are running over $300, and 256GB DDR4 kits — the kind used in higher-end workstations and servers — are pushing past $3,000.

So — Buy Now, or Wait?

If you're building or upgrading a machine in the next few months: buy the RAM now. There is no credible forecast that has prices lower six months from today than they are right now, and several have them higher. RAM doesn't lose relative performance sitting in a box the way a GPU misses a feature generation — buying early costs you nothing extra beyond the sting of a higher-than-you'd-like number on the invoice today, which is, unfortunately, the best number you're going to see for a while.

If you genuinely don't need the machine for 18+ months, "wait" is a defensible strategy — but wait for capacity, not price. Nothing in the current forecasts suggests meaningfully cheaper RAM is coming; at best you're waiting for availability to loosen slightly by H2 2027, which is a very different bet than waiting for a sale.

The one thing not to do is keep delaying a purchase you actually need on the assumption that this resolves itself soon. It's not a 2026 problem you're waiting out. It's a multi-year structural shift in where memory manufacturers choose to sell their output, and right now, it isn't you.

Sources: AppleInsider — RAM supply crisis, wccftech — memory shortages through Q4 2027, Wikipedia — 2025–present global memory supply shortage, TechTimes — DDR5 price table