OpenAI's soaring demand for DRAM is rippling across the entire industry.
Much like GPUs during the "crypto mining era," DRAM chips are now facing a major price surge, slowly but surely becoming an even more pressing problem for gamers worldwide than the increasing cost of games themselves.
Just a month after reports revealed that DRAM prices in the third quarter of 2025 jumped by a mind-boggling 171.8% year-on-year – hitting PC gamers especially hard – it now appears that console enthusiasts may be next in line, as Microsoft allegedly discusses potential Xbox hardware price increases behind the scenes.
According to Moore's Law Is Dead, citing "multiple sources," Microsoft sales representatives are already deliberating behind closed doors about how the rising price of DRAM could affect Xbox Series X/S production, potentially resulting in either yet another price hike or the entire supply running out "sooner rather than later."
The YouTuber further claimed that, unlike Microsoft, Sony anticipated this issue and stockpiled GDDR6 SDRAM months in advance, meaning PlayStation console prices should remain unchanged, at least in the short term.
When it comes to who's mostly responsible for DRAM prices going to the stratosphere, as you've probably guessed yourself – or read in the headline – it's none other than the AI industry, and in particular, ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Back in early October, it was revealed that Samsung and SK Hynix – together controlling about 70% of the global DRAM market – would begin supplying OpenAI with an astonishing number of memory chips, up to 900,000 undiced wafers per month, to meet the company's needs for AI data centers as part of its Stargate initiative.
According to Tom's Hardware, a supply of this scale could represent around 40% of global DRAM output, meaning it's not impossible that by 2027, OpenAI could control half of all Dynamic Random Access Memory. Naturally, this has already begun rippling through the tech and gaming industries, with memory prices rising not only year-on-year as mentioned above, but also month-to-month, with Samsung reportedly hiking memory chip prices by up to 60% compared to September.
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