Better times for shopping. Memory prices will go down in the new year, and graphics may also become cheaper

In order to have some good news for the New Year, we will now look at the price outlook for operating memories, i.e. mainly DDR5 and DDR4 (or mobile memories for laptops and phones). Analytical firm Trendforce, which tracks memory prices and makes predictions, has now published an estimate of where prices will move during the first quarter of 2025. And the prediction is not bad, the development could even have a positive impact on the prices of new GPUs.

While DDR5 and DDR4 memories and SSDs (NAND memories) rose in price last year in the first half of the year, this year the trend should be the opposite, at least now in the first half of the year. Memory prices were already down in the fourth quarter, falling about 3-8% overall, according to TrendForce. But during the first quarter of 2025, which is now starting, the improvement in prices will accelerate, by the end of March prices should be another 8-13% lower. But the rate of discount will be different for different types.

The reason behind the price drop is that the first half of the year is usually associated with lower demand (which is the usual seasonality), but at the same time, sales and demand in the electronics, mobile and computer markets are weaker even outside of normal seasonal factors, especially consumer demand is weak.

DDR5

For the latest current type of memory, the price fell by 3-8% in Q4 2024, and prices are set to drop further in Q1 2025, which is now starting 5–10 %. This is, of course, a number for consumer memories, i.e. modules for PCs (or the chips from which they are made). There is more demand for DDR5 server memory, in Q4 2024 it still rose in price by 3-8%, now it is set to drop again by the same percentage in Q1 2025, so overall the price will remain the same – but it could also become cheaper for servers in the following periods.

DDR4

The older DDR4 memory standard has seen a bigger drop in prices, due to a bigger drop in demand, but also because Chinese memory makers are pushing into the market and aggressively ramping up production. In the last quarter of the year, therefore, DDR4 has become cheaper by 8-13%, and now during Q1 2025 the price is set to drop further 10–15 %. And server DDR4 also recorded the same price drops in both quarters this time.

Mobile memory

There is also good news for laptops and mobile devices such as phones, whose memory will also be cheaper. However, it will be less pronounced with the latest technologies. LPDDR5X fell in price by 5-10% in Q4 2024 and is now set to drop by just 3–8 %. However, older LPDDR4X memories went down by even 13-18% in the last quarter of 2024 and will now drop further in Q1 2025 8–13 %. So cheap low-end devices that are still built with this memory could become cheaper, although this will probably only be felt in the longer term, when the effect bubbles up through the chain and accumulated stock in distribution and in stores.

GDDR6 graphics memory will also be cheaper

For the new generation graphics cards that are coming now, it may be important that the price of graphics memory, or at least GDDR6 technology, also drops a bit. While prices were steady in the fourth quarter of the old year, the price of GDDR6 is expected to go down by 8-13% in the first quarter. This could help Radeon graphics, which are likely to use GDDR6 memory even in the upcoming RX 9000 generation. On the contrary, the price of GDDR7 memories, which Nvidia will use in the GeForce RTX 5000 graphics, should drop by only 0-5%.

The group of HBM memories, which are installed on GPUs and ASICs for artificial intelligence acceleration, is the least affected by the falling demand. The high demand for such hardware has turned a previously rather marginal technology into an extremely important segment for manufacturers, in Q1 2025 it is already expected to make up 8% of the market. The demand for them is strong and their price is probably still rising, because after including them in the average, the overall prices of DRAM memories will drop by only 0-5%, while ordinary memories, when averaged without HBM, will become cheaper, as mentioned, by up to 8-13%.

Hope it lasts…

So this year could be a more cheerful time for shopping. However, some of these price declines are just erasing the previous price increases that took place in the fall of 2023 and through much of 2024. So we will need this trend to hold for a while. In any case, now is not the best time to shop. The discounting we wrote about here is forecasted throughout the quarter, so these reductions would be achieved at the end of March if the forecast is fulfilled. If you want to grab lower prices, plan your hardware or related equipment purchases more in the spring and early summer. However, we do not yet know how prices should develop in Q2 (April to June) 2025.

Source: TrendForcevia: techPowerUp