June 28, 2026
RAM-bunctious price drama
Historical memory prices 1960-2026
This wild price chart has everyone asking: are we back in 2010 already?
TLDR: Stanford published a giant history of memory and storage prices, showing how costs changed from the 1960s to today, including pricey AI-chip memory. The comments stole the show: some said prices feel like a trip back to 2010, while others argued the chart makes today’s pain look nicer than it really is.
A new Stanford memory-price tracker should have been a calm history lesson about how computer memory and storage got cheaper from 1960 to 2026. Instead, the comments instantly turned it into a group therapy session for people traumatized by expensive upgrades. The site tracks the price of everyday memory, flash storage, and the ultra-pricey memory used in artificial intelligence chips, while openly warning that some numbers are estimates and the chart is not adjusted for inflation. And yes, the page even flashes an error about the chart not loading, which only adds to the chaos.
The hottest reaction? A mix of "this isn’t so bad" and "actually, it’s worse than it looks". One commenter joked that prices have basically rolled back to 2010, then immediately ruined the optimism by pointing out that now every app is basically a browser tab in a trench coat, so cheap-looking memory still feels painfully small. Another user complained the log-scale chart makes the spike seem less dramatic than it really is, while a veteran commenter went full history mode, arguing that talking about “price per gigabyte” in the 1960s and 1970s is almost absurd because people didn’t even think in those terms back then.
And then came the classic comment-thread swerve: while everyone else was doomposting about costs, one person casually asked whether memory could store multiple voltage levels like some kind of mad-scientist sequel. In other words, the chart brought data, but the community brought the drama, nostalgia, nitpicking, and jokes about modern software bloat.
Key Points
- •Stanford University published an interactive memory-price dataset covering historical and current prices for DRAM, NAND flash, and HBM, with downloadable CSV and Excel files updated on 2026-06-24.
- •The page includes charts for overall price per gigabyte over time, DRAM prices by generation, and HBM prices by generation, including a projected HBM4 launch in Q3 2026.
- •An accelerator cost breakdown uses Epoch AI modeled estimates across Nvidia, AMD, Google TPU, and Amazon Trainium, split into HBM, logic die, packaging/CoWoS, and auxiliary costs.
- •The article states that HBM has no public spot market, so HBM pricing figures are sparse analyst estimates from TrendForce and SemiAnalysis rather than measured transaction prices.
- •Methodology notes say $/GB represents the cheapest retail price in nominal USD, not contract, average, or inflation-adjusted pricing, and caution that lowest-price listings may reflect end-of-life products and that older data is sparse.