Micron says the RAM crunch runs to 2028. Stop waiting for the dip and tune the kit you already own
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says memory shortages will last until at least 2028, most of next year's output is already sold, and buyers should expect much higher prices in 2026's wake. For PC builders, the 'wait for prices to drop' plan just died.
Rene Sjeverac
Saturday, October 3, 2026
For two years my advice to anyone asking about a new build has been the same: if your current RAM works, wait - prices always come back down. Memory is the most cyclical part of the PC. Glut, crash, shortage, repeat.
Micron just told me to shut up.
On the company's earnings call for its 2026 financial year, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the memory shortage will last until at least 2028. Worse, Micron has already sold most of what it will manufacture next year, and whoever buys RAM in 2027 should expect "much higher prices" than people paid this year. That's not an analyst guessing. That's one of the three companies that make basically all of the world's DRAM telling you the order book is full.
And yes, the irony is thick. Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are the same trio a US lawsuit accuses of worsening this crisis through price fixing. So when the people sitting on the supply say supply is tight, you can believe the numbers and still raise an eyebrow at who's profiting from them.
Why gamers are at the back of the queue
The short version: AI datacenters want memory more than you do, and they pay more for it. Every wafer that goes into server and high-bandwidth memory is a wafer that doesn't become a cheap DDR5 kit. New fab capacity takes years to come online, which is exactly why the timeline stretches into 2028 instead of next quarter. It's also why the pain isn't limited to DIMMs - SSDs, graphics cards and handhelds all carry memory on the bill of materials, and they've all been climbing.
What I'd actually do right now
If you're on a working DDR4 or DDR5 platform, don't touch it. Tune it. Most kits run looser than they need to out of the box, and an evening with timings, a proper stability test and a few benchmark passes will buy you more 1% low headroom in CPU-bound shooters than you'd expect. That's free performance in a market where nothing else is.
If you're building from scratch, buy the memory first and buy it once. For a competitive gaming rig, 32GB in a dual-channel pair is the sane target - chasing 64GB for a CS2 or Valorant box is just donating money to Micron's next earnings call. Skip the RGB tax if the same kit exists without it.
And if you've been holding cash for 'when it gets cheaper' - the people who make the chips just told you when that is. It isn't soon. The old 'just wait six months' playbook is dead until at least 2028, and anyone still selling it to you hasn't read the earnings call.
Image: Jacek Halicki / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023_Pami%C4%99ci_Corsair_Vengeance_RGB.jpg