We’ve been reporting plenty on the ongoing memory shortage, supposedly thanks to the AI boom, including data indicating that prices went up 30% in a week and 170% in a year. Now it seems things have gotten so bad, at least one retailer in Japan is actually placing restrictions on purchases.
PC Ones announced on X that, “due to the recent shortage of memory supply, our store has implemented purchase restrictions on some memory products.”
お知らせとお詫び昨今のメモリ供給不足により当店でも一部メモリの購入制限を設けております。・単体での購入をご遠慮いただいているモデル・購入数に上限を設けているモデルがございますのであらかじめご了承ください。 pic.twitter.com/Ri5dbXPPZRNovember 8, 2025
Clicking through to PC Ones’ memory subsection, most desktop PC memory products are listed as being on “backorder” and not available. The few that are in stock have a “purchase quantity limited” warning, with each customer restricted to a single unit at checkout.
So, is this a sign of things to come? Currently, major US retailers, including Newegg and Amazon, appear to have plenty of stock of the best DDR5 PC memory kits, and no doubt some not-so-good, too.
The immediate question is whether the Japanese market is a little closer to what you might call the hardware channel. Allow me to explain. AI data centres do not use the same DDR5 memory as consumer PCs. So, those kits aren’t being bought up by the likes of OpenAI.
Instead, what’s more likely to be happening is that memory chip production capacity is being tilted in favour of higher margin memory that does go, in some form, to those data centres.
Eventually, then, that shift in production will show up in depleted supplies of consumer-grade PC memory. But that takes time, especially when you factor in shipping those kits across the ocean.
It may well be, in other words, that there is less lag between that shift in production and retail supplies in Japan than in the US and other Western markets. And thus PC Ones’ memory supply woes are a harbinger of shortages that will land in the US and Europe, sooner or later.
Supplies of flash memory for SSDs are tight, too. (Image credit: Future)
Certainly, there’s no doubting there’s a pinch on all kinds of memory and storage right now. Prices have gone up dramatically everywhere, even if actual supply doesn’t seem to have stalled across the globe.
Whether it gets bad enough that PC memory actually becomes hard to buy at any price remains to be seen. But it would hardly be unprecedented for a particular class of PC component to spike in price and then become virtually unobtainable for a period. GPUs, anyone?
As for whether it’s time to actually panic, well, it certainly looks likely that the situation will get worse before it gets better. However, memory is a rather more generic technology than graphics cards. Moreover, booms and busts in the memory market are nothing new and don’t tend to last all that long. So, there’s cause to be hopeful that, however bad this gets, it won’t be as sticky and long-lasting a problem as overpriced GPUs.
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