PC building was never a cheap hobby. From the very start, owning, maintaining, and upgrading computers has been a somewhat costly affair, and while it has certainly become more accessible in the 21st century, its cost has begun to creep upward, even when you adjust for inflation.

There have always been cycles of affordability and scarcity, but AI (and the demand for it) has created a new kind of demand shock. The big players in the AI space, like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have been snapping up large swaths of silicon, which is required for the many different components that LLMs and other AI workloads use in massive quantities. Previously, sudden rises in cost for PC hardware were attributed to temporary phenomena, like the crypto mining boom and a worldwide pandemic, but AI's current hunger for memory and compute could keep PC hardware prices inflated for years to come.

PC hardware has slowly become more expensive

Cost creep is very real

Even before the AI boom, the cost of entry for enthusiasts had been steadily climbing. Component prices began rising after the pandemic disrupted logistics and manufacturing capacity. Silicon nodes shrank, complexity increased, and those costs were passed along to consumers. That isn't a dig at manufacturers either; we're talking about components that are incredibly complex, and when new standards debut, of course they'll be more expensive.

DDR5 was not cheap when it launched, but like most types of memory, as more of it is put into circulation, prices come down, allowing more builders to have access to it. The early adopter tax is certainly real, but so are shipping costs and aggressive product segmentation, which all the big players are guilty of to some extent. Those factors have kept prices rising, and it's about to get even worse.

AI workloads are driving up hardware costs

We're seeing the effects now

LLMs like GPT-5, Gemini, Claude—you name it, require immense amounts of DRAM and compute throughput to function. Each model contains billions of parameters and an unfathomable amount of training data that is loaded into high density memory. That memory isn't so different from the kind you and I put in our PCs.

Samsung and SK Hynix, two of the biggest memory manufacturers in the world, have both entered a partnership with OpenAI, and have agreed to produce 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month at an accelerated capacity. This could have massive consequences for the PC hardware space, as these silicon wafer starts produced by Samsung and SK Hynix are the same type that are used in things like CPUs and GPUs in addition to memory.

The effects of this are already being felt. According to data from PCPartPicker, DDR5 prices have gone up by anywhere between 30–50% in the last month or so following this announcement. 32 GB kits of DDR5-6000 jumped from around $125 to well over $200 at the time of writing. Other specs follow the same price increase, with DDR5-5600, DDR5-5400 and even DDR5-4800 rising similarly. DDR4 isn't safe either, but it's possible that the increase in price is due to the fact that production of DDR4 is beginning to slow as the demand for it decreases. Short-term price increases like these can also be attributed to things like tariffs, but it's yet to be seen how those will affect prices in the long-term.

We've seen this before

Well...sort of

Silicon scarcity isn't anything new to PC builders who lived through the crypto mining boom of the early 2020s, where the worldwide stock of graphics cards was completely engulfed by those looking to strike digital pay dirt. Prices skyrocketed, bots flipped inventory, and true enthusiasts were left salvaging cards from pre-builts, or paying double (or even triple) MSRP for individual cards. But eventually the craze came to a close, and stock mostly returned to shelves. Even the scarcity experienced during the most recent GPU launch cycle eventually ended, but a diversion of supply to AI workloads could cause a much longer-term scarcity that I don't think most enthusiasts are ready for.

The future of affordable PC hardware looks grim

AI is so much more lucrative for manufacturers

Companies like OpenAI plan to build data centers at an incredibly rapid rate, and the trickle-down effect on regular consumers doesn't look like a positive one. When major buyers corner the market for raw silicon, smaller segments (which includes DIY PC building) are left with less supply, and therefore higher costs.

Fabs can’t instantly scale to meet this new demand, and even small bottlenecks ripple through the market, as we've seen in the past. A single-digit percentage shift in wafer allocation toward AI servers can mean millions fewer DDR5 chips available for consumers, let alone a double-digit percentage.

On one hand, I understand it. Nvidia's evolution from "graphics card company" to "AI behemoth" has made the gaming market largely an afterthought for them; they make several billion dollars more from compute than they do from graphics, so why would they do anything other than strike $100 billion deals with AI giants?

I hope I'm wrong

The crypto boom of the early 2020s showed how a niche, high-demand market can wreak havoc on PC part pricing. But unlike mining, AI isn’t going away. It’s not a fad or a speculative bubble, but a structural shift in how silicon is consumed. Every year, models get larger, inference scales wider, and memory requirements climb higher, and unfortunately, I think that spells bad news for us PC hardware enthusiasts, but I'd love to be wrong.