Historical memory prices 1960-2026

Memory Prices | DAM

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.

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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

Absolute ($B/quarter)

Share (%)

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).

$/GB

$/TBps

Methodology note.

$/GB is the

cheapest listed retail price in nominal USD

— not contract, average, inflation-adjusted, or a confirmed sale price. DRAM history is the McCallum dataset (extended from mid-2024 by Keepa Amazon prices); NAND is Keepa's cheapest consumer-NVMe price from 2016 (approximate anchors before); HBM figures are modeled estimates. Sources are listed below and in the downloadable dataset; please check before citing.

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

(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)

(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: hsshim@stanford.edu .