- DDR5 RAM pricing appears to have plateaued in Germany
- That’s very different from the past few months of huge price leaps
- At the same time, analyst firms are forecasting major price hikes are still to come, and PCs are feeling the knock-on effects – the Raspberry Pi being the latest victim
There’s a hopeful sign that the RAM crisis might be stalling, but don’t put too much stock in this idea just yet – especially as we’re still hearing about major price hikes for memory, and also PCs, the latest of which is a big leap in cost for the compact Raspberry Pi computer board.
I’ll come back to the Raspberry Pi pricing (flagged by Tom’s Hardware) later, but first off, let’s focus on the better news from the memory market. VideoCardz spotted that German tech site 3D Center, which keeps tabs on the RAM prices at retail in that country, has found that price hikes on DDR5 memory have apparently stalled – at least for now.
Over the past month, based on the cost of a mix of 20 separate DDR5 RAM products at German retailers, pricing has only risen by a marginal 0.1% from mid-January to now.
That’s a very different picture compared to the huge leaps seen in the previous few months.
From October to November 2025, we witnessed a 49% rise, followed by a 93% price hike across these products through December 2025, and then a chunky 27% increase in January 2026. Albeit even this latter rise showed that inflation was slowing down, and has now plateaued in February according to 3D Center’s figures.
Analysis: a welcome respite, but let’s not get carried away
We need to take any such theories about reaching a pricing plateau with some caution, given that this is just one report, based on a slice of the market in a single country.
Of course, you could argue that huge inflationary spikes can only persist for so long, by their very nature – consumers are going to stop buying (in the main) if they feel pricing has become too ridiculous, which will in itself have a levelling effect in terms of supply and demand.
We’ve seen some evidence of exactly this in the stabilization of very pricey high-capacity RAM kits in recent months, which is at least a glimmer of hope amid all the gloomy news of big price increases.
However, don’t forget that, more broadly, analyst firms still believe there’s plenty of price misery to come, with TrendForce predicting that DRAM pricing is likely to rise by 50% (or a little more) in the first quarter of 2026.
We’ve also seen the cost of RAM having a knock-on effect with various products, the latest of which is the Raspberry Pi, the compact and affordable computer board, which has become less affordable due to the cost of its system memory, with the top-tier models, anyway.
Recently announced price increases have hit models of the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, which pack more than 2GB of RAM. The big increases are applied to the top-end boards with 16GB (as you might guess), and they’ve gone up in price by $60, which means the flagship Raspberry Pi 5 is now $205.
That’s 70% more expensive than this model was at launch, so it’s not that far off double the price now – and getting way out of cheap-and-cheerful territory, of course.
There isn’t much the manufacturer can do about this, though, if they’re having to pay a great deal more for the system RAM from the supplier.
The best computers for all budgets
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