TECH NEWS – „More expensive”, „price hike”, „costs more”: these are words we have to use almost every week when it comes to PC hardware.

The price hike that accompanied the memory crisis occurred in late October and early November 2025, further worsening the market situation. This was primarily due to increased demand for AI and a strained supply chain. Prices began to rise sharply due to the memory shortage. Initially, the price hike affected RAM and NAND flash memory, resulting in a sharp rise in SSD prices. However, the impact has now spread to GPUs as well. According to the latest South Korean price comparisons, a 10–20% increase was observed in just one week.

These days, owning a computer is much more expensive than it was a year or two ago due to the high cost of memory. A year ago, 32 GB of DDR5 RAM cost just over $100; today, it costs $400 or more. AI has also driven up the price of SSDs: what used to cost $100 now costs nearly twice as much. We’re already paying more for a computer because of these two components alone, but that’s not all. Looking at the GPU prices in South Korea published by Danawa, we can see significant price increases between July 31 and August 6, 2026, and these are no coincidence.

July 31st vs. August 6th Price Compare in Korea, Danawa

Original data from Danawa, number parsing and archived from github project

*Only used comparable data. Abnormal prices excluded. No comparisons for older gen.
*From single platform, not represent the whole market… pic.twitter.com/2QKRNojwN8

— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) August 6, 2026

The price increase has affected all current-generation GPUs and will likely impact the latest generation as well. Starting with the RTX 5090, we saw a 5.4% increase in price over the course of a week, followed by the RTX 5080, which saw a slightly larger increase of 6.4%. The RTX 5070 Ti increased by 7.7%, while the RTX 5070’s price rose by a record-breaking 12.9%. The 8 GB RTX 5060 Ti and the RTX 5060 saw the largest price increases, rising by 11.8%.

In addition, the price of the AMD RX 9070 XT rose by 6.1% in just one week. The RX 9070 rose by just over 1%, followed by the RX 9070 GRE, whose price increased by less than 3%. Meanwhile, the price of the RX 9060 increased by less than 5%, while the 16 GB and 8 GB versions of the RX 9060 XT rose by 11.5% and 21.2%, respectively, making it the model with the largest price increase.

Regardless of whether the price increase is caused by AI-driven demand or supply constraints, consumers are in a difficult position when making purchases at such high prices. If this upward trend continues, the latest GPUs will become even less accessible to gamers…

Source: Tech4gamers