For many years, the price of both solid state drives (SSDs) and hard drives (HDDs) were decreasing in price. About a year ago, I bought a 5TB HDD for backing up my desktop and paid $130 through Amazon. Today, that same drive is $230.
People throughout the tech industry have seen the doubling of pricing across the board when it comes to computer storage. And, like so many things in the world today, you can blame AI.
While so many are protesting the creation of massive data centers around the country with worries over higher electricity bills and environmental concerns, a slightly more niche issue has emerged thanks to AI’s need for computing power. Hard drives, for portable external ones to replacements for your PC, are going way up in price as data center companies swallow up as much storage as they can get their hands on.
The surge in demand has rippled across the technology industry and hit the hard drive market particularly severely, which is ironic considering speculation over the last decade was that the need for hardware like this would slowly disappear with a shift into the cloud. But, data centers have rapidly changed the math when it comes to storage.
And hard drive prices aren’t alone. Since early 2025, the price of RAM, once a fairly inexpensive upgrade that has been declining in price for decades, is now through the roof. What cost less than $100 in some cases to upgrade in early 2025 now runs three to four times that, what the industry has dubbed RAMageddon.
Some of this might feel like much ado about nothing in the grander scheme of AI’s potential risks to the world and humanity itself, but if you need to make what used to be a pretty easy and cheap upgrade to your computer or storage, suddenly like gas, eggs and virtually everything else, you are going to pay more.
And, there really is no clear sign that things will slow down, No doubt manufacturers will begin to stabilize pricing as they produce more tech, but no one would blame them if they didn’t. AI’s rise is still a huge gamble and many people in the technology world have predicted that data centers may eventually be replaced by smaller and cheaper tech options.
For now, it just means more money out of your pocket thanks to AI.
