- The price of DDR5 RAM appears to have plateaued in Germany
- This is very different from the huge price increases of recent months.
- At the same time, analyst firms predict that significant price increases are still to come, and PCs are feeling the consequences – with the Raspberry Pi being the latest casualty.
There’s an encouraging sign that the RAM crisis may be over, but don’t put too much stock in that idea just yet – especially since we’re still hearing about big price hikes for memory, as well as PCs, the latest of which is a big increase in the cost of the compact Raspberry Pi computing card.
I’ll come back to Raspberry Pi prices (reported by Tom’s Hardware) later, but first, let’s focus on the best news from the memory market. VideoCardz spotted that German tech site 3D Center, which monitors retail RAM prices in that country, found that DDR5 memory price hikes have apparently stalled – at least for now.
Over the past month, based on the cost of a mix of 20 separate DDR5 RAM products at German retailers, prices have only increased 0.1% between mid-January and today.
This is a very different picture compared to the enormous progress seen in previous months.
From October to November 2025, we saw a 49% increase, followed by a 93% increase in the prices of these products until December 2025, and then a sharp increase of 27% in January 2026. Although this latest increase showed that inflation was slowing and has now stabilized in February according to figures from 3D Center.
Analysis: a welcome respite, but let’s not get carried away
We must take all these theories about reaching a price plateau with caution, given that it is only one ratio, based on a slice of the market in a single country.
Of course, one could argue that huge inflation spikes can only persist for a limited period of time, by their very nature: consumers will stop buying (for the most part) if they feel that prices have become too ridiculous, which in itself will have an equalizing effect in terms of supply and demand.
We’ve seen evidence of this in the stabilization of very expensive high-capacity RAM kits over the past few months, which is at least a glimmer of hope amid all the grim news of big price increases.
However, keep in mind that, more generally, analyst firms still think major pricing misery is ahead, with TrendForce forecasting DRAM prices to rise 50% (or a bit more) in the first quarter of 2026.
We’ve also seen the cost of RAM have a ripple effect across various products, the latest being the Raspberry Pi, the compact and affordable computer board, which has become less affordable due to the cost of its system memory, at least with higher-end models.
The recently announced price increases affected the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 models, which pack more than 2GB of RAM. The big increases are applied to the high-end 16GB cards (as you might guess), and their price has increased by $60, meaning the flagship Raspberry Pi 5 now costs $205.
That’s 70% more expensive than this model was at launch, so it’s not that far off double the price now – and we’re definitely straying from cheap and happy territory.
However, there is not much the manufacturer can do about this if it has to pay significantly more for system RAM from the vendor.
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