ASUS Falls ‘Victim” to RAMpocalypse: said to Announce Price Hikes Prior to CES

There seems to be no escaping pricing increases thanks to amount of silicone being gobbled up by AI data centers.

ASUS seems to be the latest “victim” of these price increases. In a leaked memo ASUS is said to announce these price increases prior to CES 2025 on January 5th.

Impact

This will directly impact the consumer sector with an emphasis on the gaming space. ASUS who recently released their newest handheld with Microsoft that already starts at $599 for the ROG Xbox Ally and $999 for the ROG Xbox Ally X.

Along with the STRIX line of devices there is nothing I was able to find at the time of publishing that reflects the new pricing. As a conservative number the RAM price increase could be somewhere around 40% at enterprise level bulk purchasing.

Inventory

The interesting thing here is 2026 RAM purchasing contracts should have been completed months ago. That would suggest that ASUS either dropped the ball, is selling more than expected, made a decision to kneecap consumers or all of the above.

It’s not only RAM being affected by the AI bubble but also the VRAM used in graphics cards. Unfortunately graphics cards had finally come down to retail levels after the Bitcoin Mining boom and are now raising even faster.

We have also seen Micron announce they are no longer going to be producing their Crucial consumer brand RAM and SSDs. With only 3 major RAM manufacturers in the consumer space this also drastically impacts this accelerated pricing increase. 

Rumor

The NVIDA RTX 5090 is expected to reach $5kUSD with it nearing $4kUSD for the $2kUSD card in some markets already. Unless you are looking to build your own LLM you might find this card is more than you need anyways,

There is no end in sight for these increases and until the AI bubble burst ASUS is just the latest victim but by no means will be the last.

Buy now if you need to

None of this is good news for anyone looking to build a PC or pickup one of ASUS’s new Xbox Ally handhelds. Oh yeah memory prices of course are on the rise now too with everything from NVME to microSD cards as production changes start to cause shortages.

BestBuy has yet to increase the prices of the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds as of this publishing so if you want one I would jump on it now, links are below.

Note: the message doesn’t specify the Ally Xbox handhelds but it’s assumed these will rise as Microsoft has stated the pricing is in ASUS’s hands for these handhelds.

Are you going to pick anything up prior to the pricing increases? If so what are you grabbing?

GameOn

CellPhish

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