Exceleram warns RAM shortage is still escalating

Exceleram’s VP of Product, Steffen Eisenstein, has shared a detailed breakdown of the ongoing RAM shortage, warning that the industry is still only at the beginning of the crisis. According to Eisenstein, the AI boom has pushed memory inventories to their limits, and securing DRAM has become harder than ever.

Eisenstein says the situation began far earlier than many realised. “For us as a RAM manufacturer, the crisis began as early as the fourth quarter of 2025,” he explains. “In October last year, we saw DRAM prices rise sharply for the first time, the price jumps at the time were already extreme.” As partners recognised the looming shortage, Exceleram saw larger orders and depleted inventories while new DRAM became increasingly expensive.

Even for long‑standing manufacturers, the current environment is unusual. “It has never been this difficult to secure DRAM,” Eisenstein says. Major suppliers saw record stock‑market gains, and in December 2025, Micron officially withdrew from the consumer RAM and SSD market. Meanwhile, medium‑sized companies struggled to keep PC assembly profitable. “High RAM prices are making cost calculations difficult,” he notes, with some partners abandoning the segment entirely.

By early 2026, analysts and media outlets were openly referring to a “memory crisis”. Exceleram’s inventories were empty, production costs were high, and demand collapsed. “We even canceled our Computex booth because under these circumstances, it did not make sense to find new resellers,” Eisenstein says. Supply delays followed, and while production continued for existing partners, sales dropped sharply.

Demand began to recover slightly in Q2 and Q3, but the underlying issues remained. Eisenstein recalls a conversation with a journalist who told him: “People have accepted that RAM has become more expensive and is not going to get cheaper again.” Even so, he warns that high prices have led to lower demand and tighter competition, with margins far smaller than they appear.

The most concerning development, according to Eisenstein, is that the crisis is still escalating. “In some cases, we have not received any offers for the chips we need for weeks,” he writes, adding that supply security is deteriorating to the point where it is slowing down the development of new consumer hardware. “That is the uncomfortable truth: The RAM crisis is far from over. It may have only just begun.”

KitGuru Says: Anyone who was hoping for the PC hardware market to bounce back in 2027 may end up being disappointed. If Exceleram are right on this, then things could continue to get worse until new production lines open up to increase capacity, but this is a process that takes a lot of time and money. 

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