For the past few months, RAM prices have been shooting through the roof, as the rapid buildout of AI datacenters causes an ever tightening shortage of memory chips. The Crucial brand has been a staple of affordable PC gaming for nearly three decades, and its death is being seen as a canary in a coal mine. RAM prices have already surged by 171 percent year-over-year on average, with many products seeing even worse price hikes. The pre-built PC company CyberPowerPC warned last month that surging RAM prices have “had a direct impact on the cost of building gaming PCs” that are forcing it to raise prices. As of this year’s second quarter, it boasted an almost 25 percent market share of DRAM production, which is what forms the RAM used in consumer computers.