So I was pricing out a second NAS box for my home lab this month and nearly closed the tab. A 32GB DDR5 kit that was going for around R2,000 mid last year is sitting between R7,000 and R8,500 now depending on the retailer. Evetech even put out a note telling people to buy now because they can’t hold pricing once older stock runs out.
It’s not just DDR5 either. DDR4 has jumped 100 to 130 percent because the big three have basically stopped making it to focus wafers on AI memory instead. SSD pricing followed the same curve, up 70 to 95 percent, worse on the bigger capacities.
The annoying part is this looks structural, not a blip. Analysts reckon late 2027 before there’s any real relief, so the AI datacentre buildout just keeps eating the DRAM supply.
Anyone here still going ahead with a build, or are you all sitting on older kit and hoping? Curious if the Pi and ARM crowd are feeling any of this too, since most SBCs use soldered memory.
Same here, I checked pricing for a simple RAM upgrade a few weeks back and just gave up. What used to be a casual R1,500 top up for extra headroom is now a proper budget decision. Feels like the days of casually maxing out a build are gone for a while. Wondering if this pushes more people toward pre-built systems from the big retailers instead of DIY, since bulk buying power might soften the blow a bit compared to buying single kits at retail.
This doesn’t surprise me at all, and it’s the same story with school computer labs, we get told the equipment budget for next year won’t stretch as far because suppliers are quoting new prices every few months. What worries me more is what happens to refurbished machines going into township schools, if the parts market dries up those old boxes just become e-waste with no upgrade path. The Pi and SBC crowd might dodge the RAM spike but they’ll still feel it somewhere, everything in that supply chain is connected whether people admit it or not.
Been keeping half an eye on this for my home lab and it’s brutal, a supplier quoted me last week and it was nearly triple what I paid for the same 64GB kit eighteen months ago. From what I’ve read the shortage is mostly datacentre and AI chip demand eating into DRAM fab capacity, so it’s not really a local problem, we’re just further down the supply chain and feeling the exchange rate on top of it. Lerato’s point about the school labs worries me most, I’ve donated a few old machines to a community centre before, and if refurb parts dry up those units just become e-waste with nowhere to go. Anyone actually holding off on a build right now, or are you all just biting the bullet before it gets worse?