[News] China’s Memory Market Reportedly Sees Daily Price Hikes; 16GB DDR4 Module Soars 160% in October

Posted by imaginary_num6er@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 14 comments

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Frostybum8243@reddit

SSD prices have skyrocketed in Canada.

A 2TB drive has gone from $115 to $170 in the last 2 months.

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imaginary_num6er@reddit (OP)

Interestingly, Yicai notes that social media has been buzzing with the phrase “memory crazier than gold” for the past month, even landing on Weibo’s trending list. The report highlights that the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max now costs RMB 4,000 more than the 1TB model, while on the Android side, upgrading from 256GB to 512GB typically adds RMB 500–600.

The surge is also hitting laptops. As per Yicai, a Lenovo 16GB DDR5 module that stayed around RMB 300 from May to early September has jumped to RMB 599, and a Samsung 16GB DDR5 module priced near RMB 400 in September has climbed to RMB 738.

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Cant_Think_Of_UserID@reddit

I hope phone manufacturers don't use it as an excuse to lower the storage and memory tiers that comes with their phones to save money.

Somehow, 16GB Storage / 2GB RAM base model returned

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SignalSatisfaction90@reddit

I wouldn’t tie the two together, it’s ram that’s exponential here, non volatile storage is getting more expensive, but not at the same rate

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Rodot@reddit

Does lowering storage really save that much? I always thought the reason to lower storage was to encourage users to subscribe to cloud services

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crab_quiche@reddit

Over the amount of phones that they sell it does add up. Plus they can then charge 10x their cost for slightly more storage because you have no other choice if you want more storage.

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I bought a burner 2 years ago with 256GB FLASH, 8GB RAM for ~ $200 CAD. A month ago, the battery went spicy pillow, so I was looking around and shocked to find the same vendor gone stagnate. Reason why I tried to stick with that vendor is that they ship a vanilla Android with no vendor added crapware. The top model of the same line has same SoC half the memory as their top model. They might have added RFID, but I didn't care about that. Other product line has 6GB RAM and 128GB as top model.

I ended up getting a replacement battery and fixed it myself.

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doneandtired2014@reddit

They won't, they're just going to bend you over a barrel and take you to pound town in the most unloving way possible in terms of pricing while they also encourage you to buy somewhere within the launch window in order to avoid future price hikes.

It is a fucked up time to be alive when the same generation of tech *goes up in price* over time instead of down.

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WarEagleGo@reddit

yuck, you are right

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hurtfulthingsourway@reddit

RAMs getting so high people are going to be able to sell off old dimm's for the price of old one.

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KnownDairyAcolyte@reddit

Feeling frothy for sure

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Trzlog@reddit

I really hope they figure out EUV and competitive process nodes, then they can slap Hynix et al. the fuck around when they flood the market.

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aprx4@reddit

China has been manufacturing NAND for a while, SSD is also getting more expensive as of late 2025. Investing in new capacities take years while nobody can be sure that this surging demand (from datacenter) is sustainable. YMTC also try to avoid flooding market with excess supply.