A Crucial Pro DDR5 RAM kit that cost £79 in the UK last year is now selling for £351. That’s a 344% increase on a single component. A 64GB DDR5 kit that cost £165 in early 2025 now sells for £510. Some Corsair kits have gone from £200 to £900. This isn’t a temporary spike or a supply blip — it’s a structural shift in who the memory industry is building hardware for. And the answer, increasingly, is not you.
The cause is AI. The consequence is that gaming PCs are getting significantly more expensive, and the situation is unlikely to improve before 2027 at the earliest.
What’s Actually Happening
The global memory shortage that began in late 2025 has one primary driver: AI data centres consume enormous quantities of RAM, and the manufacturers that make it are prioritising those customers over the consumer market. The economics are straightforward — AI companies pay higher margins and buy in vastly larger volumes than PC builders ever could.
Major RAM manufacturer Micron has exited the consumer memory business entirely, discontinuing the Crucial brand to focus on AI data centre supply. SK Hynix announced its entire 2026 capacity was sold out before the year began. Samsung is similarly redirected. OpenAI’s Stargate project alone is forecast to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output.
The knock-on effects are substantial. Every wafer committed to High Bandwidth Memory for AI accelerators is one that cannot be used for the DDR5 in your next gaming rig. Industry analysts have warned that memory-driven cost increases are pushing overall gaming PC pricing up by 15-20% in 2026, with no meaningful relief expected until new manufacturing capacity comes online — which takes years, not months.
Dell’s Chief Operating Officer put it bluntly: he has “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast.” Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer and Asus have all warned of 15-20% price increases through the second half of 2026. IDC research suggests the shortage could persist well into 2027.
This Is Already Hitting UK Buyers
The UK market is feeling this sharply. In some mainstream DDR5 configurations, prices have risen dramatically in a matter of months — the Crucial Pro example above is one of the more extreme cases, but far from unique. DDR4, which many assumed would remain a cheaper fallback, is also affected: the same 32GB kit that cost £60-90 in October 2025 was selling for £150-180 by January 2026.
The RTX 5090 launched at £1,939 MSRP in the UK and is currently selling for £2,999 or more with extremely limited stock. The GPU shortage isn’t from a lack of silicon — it’s from GDDR memory, the same supply chain squeeze hitting system RAM, affecting every graphics card that depends on it.
For UK PC gamers specifically, the window for affordable building has effectively closed for now. Those who upgraded in 2024 got the better end of the deal. Those building now are paying significantly more for the same specifications — and the situation won’t quickly reverse.
The Games Industry Isn’t Happy Either
Hardware costs are one half of the problem. The other is what AI is doing inside the games industry itself.
The 2026 State of the Game Industry report — based on responses from over 2,300 industry professionals surveyed ahead of GDC — makes uncomfortable reading. 52% of game developers now believe generative AI is bad for the industry, up from 30% the previous year. Only 7% think it’s having a positive impact. 28% of respondents had been laid off in the past two years — rising to 33% among US-based workers. Half said their current or most recent employer had carried out layoffs in the past 12 months.
The picture that emerges is of an industry caught between efficiency gains promised by AI and the reality of widespread job losses, creative erosion, and a workforce that is deeply uncomfortable with the direction of travel. The tools are being adopted regardless — but the people using them are, by a significant majority, unconvinced it’s good for anyone except the balance sheet.
Meanwhile, Nvidia Is Having the Best Years in Its History
If you want to understand where the money is going, look at Nvidia’s financials.
In fiscal year 2026 — which ended January 2026 — Nvidia posted total revenue of approximately $268 billion, with data centre revenues alone reaching $193.7 billion, up 68% year on year. Q4 alone brought in $68.1 billion in revenue. Net income for the year was around $43 billion in the final quarter, up 94% year on year. Gross margins sit at around 75%.
For context: gaming revenue — once Nvidia’s dominant business — brought in $16 billion for the full year. Data centres brought in $193.7 billion. Five years ago, those numbers were roughly equal. The AI boom didn’t just shift Nvidia’s focus — it rendered gaming a rounding error in the company’s overall story.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has directly addressed talk of an AI bubble: “From our vantage point, we see something very different.” He may be right. The capital expenditure commitments from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Alphabet to AI infrastructure run into the hundreds of billions. Nvidia is at the centre of all of it.
The RTX 5090 still exists. Nvidia hasn’t abandoned gaming hardware. But the company that once defined PC gaming is now primarily an AI infrastructure business that also makes graphics cards on the side. That shift has consequences for everyone building or buying a gaming PC in 2026.
What This Means for PC Gamers
In practical terms, a few things are worth knowing right now:
If you need to upgrade RAM or buy a new system, buying sooner rather than later is generally the better call — prices are unlikely to fall meaningfully through 2026, and another increase is more probable than a drop. Pre-built systems may offer better value than self-builds at this point, because system integrators purchased components in bulk before the worst of the price increases hit.
If you’re happy with your current setup, sitting tight is perfectly reasonable. The games themselves haven’t changed. A PC that played everything well in 2024 still plays everything well now. The urgency only applies if you actually need new hardware.
And if you’re tempted by the retro route — an older machine, a console, a Raspberry Pi setup — this is a pretty good moment to consider it. The cost of entry to classic gaming has never been more attractive relative to the cost of cutting-edge PC hardware. The gap between what you pay for a working Mega Drive and what you’d pay for a current-gen GPU is wider than it has ever been.
Prices were accurate when we wrote this — but the market moves fast. Always check before you buy.
Building or upgrading? Our Gaming Monitor guide and Best Gaming Headsets cover what’s still worth buying at a fair price. Or if now feels like the right time to go retro, our Best Retro Consoles guide has you covered.