Historical memory prices 1960-2026

Historic and current memory and storage prices, collected in the spirit of John C. McCallum's classic memory-price dataset — interactive, with the raw data downloadable. Hover for details, click the legend to toggle series, drag or use the slider to zoom, and use the camera icon to export an image. Price per gigabyte over time Historical lowest $/GB on a log scale — one line per memory type: DRAM, NAND flash, and HBM. DRAM price by generation The DRAM line above, broken out by generation across the full history — Pre-DDR (SDRAM/core), DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4, DDR5. (Generation is inferred from product descriptions, so older points are approximate.) Accelerator cost breakdown Modeled estimates from Epoch AI: quarterly accelerator cost across the four largest AI-accelerator designers — Nvidia, AMD, Google (TPU) and Amazon (Trainium) — stacked by component (HBM, logic die, packaging/CoWoS, auxiliary), a production-volume-weighted average. HBM price by generation By HBM generation (HBM2e → HBM3 → HBM3e → HBM4). HBM is sold only to accelerator makers on confidential contracts — there is no public spot market — so these are sparse industry-analyst estimates (TrendForce / SemiAnalysis), not transaction prices. HBM4 is projected (launches Q3 2026). $/TBps is cost per unit of memory bandwidth (stack price ÷ per-stack bandwidth). Methodology, sources and caveats Sources and method | Category | What we track | Source and method | Reliability | |---|---|---|---| | DRAM $/GB | cheapest retail $/GB, overall and by generation (DDR3/DDR4/DDR5) | Deep history (1957–2024): the McCallum memory-price dataset (jcmit.net, via the Internet Archive). Mid-2024 onward: the cheapest new consumer DIMM each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly. | Reference + live | | NAND $/GB | cheapest retail SSD $/GB, 2010–present | 2016 onward: the cheapest consumer NVMe SSD each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly; SATA and enterprise/datacenter drives are excluded, and per-drive posting glitches are filtered (see caveats). 2010–2016: four approximate pre-NVMe anchor points (no McCallum-equivalent flash dataset exists). | Live + approximate | | HBM spend and cost breakdown | quarterly HBM spend ($B) and each component's share (%) of the accelerator bill of materials (HBM, logic, packaging, auxiliary) | Epoch AI (CC-BY): a modeled estimate, production-volume-weighted across the four largest accelerator designers (Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon); aggregate only, no per-company split. | External estimate | | HBM $/GB by generation | HBM price per GB and per TB/s of bandwidth, by generation | Industry-analyst estimates — TrendForce and SemiAnalysis (HBM has no public spot market); bandwidth from JEDEC/Rambus. HBM4 is projected. | Sparse estimate | Caveats - $/GB is the cheapest retail price in nominal USD — not contract, average, or inflation-adjusted, and retail lags contract pricing. - The cheapest listing often tracks an end-of-life generation being cleared out, not the leading edge — the per-generation chart shows this. - These are cheapest listed prices over time (via Keepa), not confirmed sales. For the SSD data, obvious posting errors are removed — any month a drive is listed more than 60% below its own typical price (e.g. a $130 SSD shown at $4) is dropped. - The DRAM line splices two sources at mid-2024 (McCallum → Keepa); a small step there is expected, since Amazon's cheapest clearance can sit below McCallum's representative low. - HBM figures are modeled estimates (cost share and spend), not measured prices. Updates DRAM and NAND $/GB refresh monthly from Keepa; HBM updates quarterly (Epoch AI). The McCallum backbone and HBM estimates are fixed. The downloadable CSV lists every point with its source. About Compiled and maintained by David Shim, Stanford DAM project. Questions or corrections: [email protected].