It’s been around 10 years since I built my first PC; after running my uncle’s old Intel CPU in the early 2010s and then moving onto a newer laptop, getting to put together a desktop was something else. Watching many videos to figure out how to do it, and after a grueling day of hard labour, seeing that BIOS screen on the TV was great – preceded by many hours of gaming (and definitely some university work).

Now 10 years on, the market has been through so much; the 2020 pandemic and crypto boom shook the market first, then, with a seemingly little calm period in between, we enjoyed the rise of AI. With everything that’s happened, PC components have seemingly never recovered, and now I struggle to see how many of us can build anything for a reasonable price.

The prices of GPUs in the past year

Before any price hike had even occurred, the launch of the new generation of Nvidia gaming GPUs hit shelves at an eye-watering price point. Announced back in January 2025, an MSRP of $2,000 for a consumer card (RTX 5090) was astounding, improving dramatically on the previous flagship RTX 4090. Even the more mainstream RTX 5080 came out for $999. Despite this, Jensen justified its price point by stating there was already great demand for it, and they were building the best – which was clearly designed as a more consumer-friendly workhorse GPU compared to its Pro tier of cards.

Despite the high MSRP, price hikes were still imminent – even in the past couple of months, GPU prices have risen by up to 40%. Zooming out further to the past year, it’s an even bigger increase. 3DCenter tracks these prices over a much longer time period. They show that the average increase from November 2025 to October 2026 (in the German market) for Nvidia was 66%, for AMD 46%, and for Intel GPUs 38%.

That broad increase comes down to the limited supply of DRAM and the increasing price as a result. Samsung announced a 20% increase in the second half of the year, which is then obviously passed on to the end product and the consumer. So that leads to the higher-tiered cards getting the brunt of the raises. As UDN reports in that news, the cost of 3GB GDDR7 chips has gone up to between $60 and $70, with a more standard 2GB GDDR7 chip at $20 – so 50% higher capacity costs three times as much.

As such, the likes of an RTX 5090 had in fact risen in price by 132% on average, with the 5060 Ti 16GB up 74%, then followed by the RX 9060 XT 8GB at 65%. Even with its lower VRAM, the AMD GPU still felt the brunt of it.

Will GPU pricing change any time soon?

The problem isn’t just the rising cost of manufacturing GPUs, but the growing demand for memory from data centres, which is diverting resources away from consumer graphics cards and keeping prices high.

Even with the RAM manufacturers being sued for potentially exploiting the current situation, there are still plenty of plans to keep expanding on the current data center buildout. According to Cleanview, there are currently over 1,300 data centers in operation with a capacity of 63,000 MW already. But that is expected to nearly double, with another 2,400 planned and on the way, increasing the capacity to 381,000 MW.

Now, not all of them are specifically AI plants, but any center is likely going to be using compute power. Ranging in ability from what they do with their setup, that’s still plenty of memory to take up. As Digitimes reports, the supply for next year, 2027, has already been sold out, and so it’s a very limited supply where the gaming market (and anything beyond data centers) is getting left behind. You only have to look at Nvidia’s earnings reports to see gaming being relegated to edge computing, so it doesn’t even really make a difference to its profits.

All said, there’s no surprise that experts are already expecting the shortage to continue into 2028. Only three major manufacturers of the cutting-edge DRAM are controlling 87% of the market share. According to Counterpoint, it really is going to be hard for them to get any more availability soon. With Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron selling primarily fast HBM, these fast graphics manufacturers have little slower GDDR modules around for normal graphics cards or even any for RAM, and that’s where it’s all headed.

What you can try to do

The entire situation is rather demoralizing, but there are still ways to enjoy the hobby without spending your life savings. One thing is to scour the second-hand market; trying to find used hardware will definitely get you some savings on a variety of hardware.

It doesn’t come without its risks, of course: the card could be broken or mis-sold bit of kit, a scam, or not what it’s meant to be. It is a bit of a minefield, but if you’re savvy enough, it can be a great place to find some PC components, even if they are of an older generation.

Another option is to look at your supporting hardware for ways to upgrade. Looking for better gaming monitors is definitely an easy way to do it. OLED monitors provide an impressive new look with their technology that keeps getting better every year, and they are getting cheaper. With lower risks of failure or burn-in, you can find a top-notch display for cheaper.

Sure, these are stopgaps for now, but eventually I’d like to imagine the market does get back to normal. I don’t imagine it getting back to the lows of previous years, but at least down to levels that aren’t so outrageous. Maybe the AI bubble bursts, and there will be plenty of hardware flooding the markets for cheap – leaving plentiful parts for gamers to enjoy. But that’s not coming for a few years yet.

About the Author

Sebastian Kozlowski

With a fascination for technology and games, Seb is a tech writer with a focus on hardware, news, and deals. He is also a tester and reviewer for the site. Contact him @ [email protected]