Memory module prices suddenly plummeted! Wholesalers: It collapsed outright, dropping over 100 yuan in a day! Will prices rise again? Institutional analysis

If you’re trading stocks, look at the Golden Kirin analysts’ research reports—authoritative, professional, timely, and comprehensive. Help you uncover high-potential theme opportunities!

Recently, the relentlessly frenzied memory market has finally started to cool off.

According to market-tracking data, this week DDR5 memory from multiple U.S. retailers saw widespread price cuts. The maximum drop for a single kit reached $100. The price cuts were reflected across major e-commerce platforms such as Amazon U.S. and Newegg, especially on Corsair’s VENGEANCE DDR5 lineup, where the reductions were particularly noticeable.

On Amazon, Corsair’s VENGEANCE 32GB DDR5-6400 is currently priced at about $379.99, down nearly 29% from a recent peak of roughly $490. Corsair’s 16GB DDR5-5200 is currently around $219.99, down 18.2% from the previous historical high of $260.

In the domestic market, on March 30, according to media reports, after the reporter checked the second-hand platform Xianyu, the average deal price for memory modules over the past seven days fell by 50 yuan compared with the prior week, to 350 yuan. The average deal price for DDR5 fell by 20 yuan week over week, to 1,090 yuan.

On the Xiaohongshu social platform, discussions have also begun to appear, such as “Can memory be bought now?” and “The memory I stocked up on is a loss.” Posts by individual sellers offering idle memory have clearly increased. Meanwhile, on the DOUDE (Desktops & Toys) community platform at Dediqu (DeDe), the price of 32G DDR5 memory modules hit the highest point on March 5 at about 3,699 yuan per stick; it has since dropped to around 3,149 yuan, a reduction of 550 yuan.

Storage equipment wholesalers: prices have collapsed outright

Down more than a hundred dollars in a day

According to an article from OrangeSi Interactive · City Express on March 29, starting last week, memory module prices saw a cliff-like drop. The market generally believes that major players who had stockpiled memory earlier are now selling off, but because prices are still high, the terminal consumer market’s ability to absorb demand is very limited.

“Since last Saturday, prices have just collapsed.” Seeing an OrangeSi Interactive reporter, Wang, the owner of a wholesaler who has operated a memory storage equipment business for many years, sighed. He pointed to a newly arrived quotation sheet in his shop and said, “From yesterday to today, a mainstream 16G memory module dropped another 40 to 50 yuan. On last Saturday, it was even more extreme—one day it dropped more than 100 yuan.”

Wang said that after doing business in memory for many years, the market price fluctuations over the past two years are the biggest—almost a different price every day, with an average daily fluctuation of 50 yuan.

He described to the reporter a price curve for a 16G 3200MHz memory module, which is the most commonly purchased by individual consumers: back in May last year, it was around more than 130 yuan. Then starting in the second half of the year, it surged all the way up, reaching a peak of 980 yuan in December last year, and then remained in high-level consolidation. Until last Saturday, it started dropping straight down. On March 27, the price had already fallen to around 700 yuan.

As for the reasons behind this round of price declines, Wang believes it is the combined result of the market’s supply-demand relationship and stockpiling psychology. “The most fundamental reason is that demand is gone.” he said helplessly. “When prices get that high, if it’s not a just-need purchase, people won’t buy. Compared with before November last year, our sales are down by 60%—and that’s not all.”

Another key factor is the concentrated “sell-off” of previously stockpiled inventory. One wholesaler revealed that when prices rose last year, many people outside the circles rushed to stock up. Now that prices have fallen, it has triggered that sell-off—but the market’s absorption capacity isn’t good.

As a result, a rare “price inversion” situation has appeared in the memory market: the brand factory price is higher than the market’s sell-off price.

Wang couldn’t escape this downturn either. “Around the time of last year’s National Day holiday, we also heard news from upstream factories and stockpiled some goods in small batches. At the time, we thought prices would still rise, but we didn’t expect that the rise would stop by December. After that, sales kept not picking up, so we didn’t dare to stock up again. But even now, some of the goods we still have in hand were from around August and September last year.”

Capital market volatility

Will memory prices keep rising in the long run?

With this sudden flash collapse in memory prices, the rumor mill suggests it may be influenced by Google’s recent release of the TurboQuant memory compression technology.

On March 24, local time, Google released a memory compression algorithm called TurboQuant. Google said TurboQuant can reduce the memory footprint of the key parts running of large language models at runtime—namely the key-value cache (KV Cache)—to 1/6 of the original amount without losing accuracy. In specific tests on NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs, performance could improve by as much as 8 times.

Some market viewpoints believe this technology will reduce AI’s demand for memory.

The news quickly triggered the market’s reassessment logic. Andrew Rocha, an analyst at Wells Fargo, believes this technology may affect how future demand for memory capacity specifications is judged. He thinks the market will quickly re-evaluate how much memory capacity AI really needs.

“While this doesn’t affect demand in the short term, it has already triggered panic within the industry.” Pan Helin, a committee member of the Information and Communications Economic Expert Committee under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, believes memory modules will continue to see price declines in the future, though over a longer time span. As production capacity gradually stabilizes, the supply-demand gap has already shown up in prices, and future memory module prices will have little support.

On the first U.S. stock trading day after the news was released, the storage chip sector collectively plunged during the intraday trading. SanDisk’s stock price fell as much as 6.5% at one point, and the decline narrowed to 3.5% at the close. The market value loss was $3.63 billion. On the same day, Micron Technology fell 3.4%, for a market value loss of $15.17B. Western Digital dropped 1.63%, with a market value loss of $1.66B. Seagate Technology fell 2.76%, with a market value loss of $2.14 billion.

Although the market reacted sharply in the short term, institutional views clearly diverged. Some institutions believe the market’s overall demand for memory may not decrease significantly; instead, it could accelerate the deployment of AI inference applications by weakening the limitations of memory capacity on AI performance.

Morgan Stanley noted that the impact scope of the TurboQuant technology is limited. It only works on the KV cache in the inference stage and does not affect model weights, nor does it involve the training process. Therefore, this doesn’t mean overall storage demand declines to 1/6; rather, it improves unit hardware efficiency, enabling the same hardware to handle longer contexts or serve more users.

Some analysis suggests the reason behind this round of price declines is the combined effect of market supply-demand relationships and stockpiling sentiment. At first, when prices rose, people rushed to stock up. Now that prices fall, it triggers the concentrated sell-off of previously stockpiled inventory. This short-term sell-off behavior does not mean the market’s supply-demand relationship has truly reversed.

Also, according to media reports, after talking with several supply-chain insiders in the storage industry, reporters found that across retail, the spot market, and even the entire industrial chain, supplying storage products is still a “long-standing hard problem.” Tai Wei, general manager of the CFM flash market, even said plainly that the expansion cycle of storage production capacity is 18 to 24 months, and the earliest new capacity release would not be until 2027.

An internal executive at JiangboLong, a storage module vendor, told reporters that “the long-term trend of price increases has not changed.” In the industry’s view, this “memory module price decline” is more like an amplified short-term fluctuation.

		Sina’s statement: This message is republished from Sina’s partner media. Sina.com posts this article for the purpose of transmitting more information, and does not imply agreement with its viewpoints or confirmation of its descriptions. The article content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Investors act at their own risk.

Vast amounts of information and precise interpretation—now in the Sina Finance APP