If you've priced a build this year, put it down for a month and priced it again, you've seen it: the number went up. That's not your imagination and it's not us — it's a memory market being eaten alive by AI datacentres. Here's what the forecasters are actually saying, and what it means if you're planning a PC.
Industry forecaster TrendForce (July 2026) expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise another 13–18% quarter-on-quarter in Q3 2026.
Same TrendForce forecast: NAND flash contract prices projected up 10–15% quarter-on-quarter, driven by AI inference and datacentre deployments.
Nvidia lifted GPU kit costs 20–30% across the GeForce range in July — its third rise this year, blaming graphics memory (GDDR7/GDDR6) costs.
Gartner forecasts combined RAM and SSD prices up around 130% by the end of 2026, adding roughly 17% to average PC prices.
"Prices are not coming down. For the next four quarters, they're only going to go up."
— Shrish Pant, director analyst at Gartner, to CRN Australia, March 2026One cause, plainly: AI datacentres are buying up memory production, so RAM, SSD and graphics card prices keep climbing. Every hyperscaler building AI capacity needs staggering amounts of DRAM and NAND, the fabs can't expand fast enough, and gamers are bidding against the datacentre giants for the same chips.
Graphics cards get hit twice — the card itself carries several gigabytes of that same expensive memory. That's the stated reason behind Nvidia's July kit-cost rise: it blamed graphics memory (GDDR7/GDDR6) costs directly.
This isn't an overseas story that'll wash out by the time it reaches us. It already landed: 32GB DDR5 kits in Australian retail jumped 38% in a single month back in January. And Gartner told Australian trade press prices aren't coming down for at least the next four quarters, with no real relief expected before 2027.
For a gaming build, the maths is straightforward: RAM, SSD and GPU are usually two-thirds or more of the parts bill, and those are exactly the three categories rising. A build that's "wait and see" priced today is unlikely to be cheaper at Christmas — if the forecasters are right, it'll cost more.
64GB RAM, big NVMe drives, high-VRAM GPUs — the exact spec of a serious 1440p/4K rig — sit right in the blast radius. If that's the machine you want, the forecast direction matters to you more than to someone buying a basic office box.
We won't pretend we can freeze prices — nobody honestly can in this market. What we can do is simpler: our 160-part builder prices update live from Australian suppliers, so the number on screen is current. When you order, that's the price you pay. That's the whole mechanic — no asterisks.
Forecasts are forecasts. TrendForce, Gartner and Nvidia's own pricing all currently point the same way, but if you don't need a PC, "the market says up" isn't a reason to buy one. If you were already planning a build in the next six months, though, the honest read of the evidence is: sooner beats later.
Spec it in the builder and see today's live price — no obligation, no email wall. Or call (02) 4041 2110 and talk it through.