Back to Devoured - June 29, 2026
DEVOURED
Memory Prices report from Stanford

Memory Prices report from Stanford

AI hardwaredatainfrastructure Stanford
Stanford’s new interactive DAM project provides historical and current price data for memory, storage, and AI accelerators to track industry cost trends.
What: The Stanford DAM (Data, Analytics, and Memory) project offers a public repository of price-per-gigabyte trends for DRAM, NAND flash, and HBM memory. The dataset aggregates historical pricing from the McCallum dataset and monthly updates from Keepa for consumer hardware, alongside modeled estimates for AI accelerator costs.
Why it matters: Centralized, transparent tracking of memory and accelerator costs is essential for forecasting the economic feasibility of scaling large-scale AI infrastructure.
Deep dive
  • Dataset Scope: Includes DRAM (1957–present), NAND flash (2010–present), and modeled HBM cost shares.
  • HBM Insights: Estimates based on analyst reports (TrendForce/SemiAnalysis) since no public spot market exists for high-bandwidth memory.
  • Normalization: Prices are available in nominal or inflation-adjusted (2024$) dollars.
  • Accelerator Breakdown: Modeled costs for Nvidia, AMD, Google (TPU), and Amazon (Trainium) hardware stacks.
Decoder
  • HBM (High Bandwidth Memory): A specialized type of computer memory that uses vertical stacking and wide buses to provide the extreme data transfer rates required by AI chips like the Nvidia H100.
Original article

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.

Price per gigabyte over time

Historical lowest $/GB on a log scale — one line per memory type: DRAM, NAND flash, and HBM. Toggle nominal vs inflation-adjusted dollars (constant 2024 $, US CPI-U).

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 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 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. 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 $/GB, 2010–present 2016 onward: the cheapest consumer NVMe SSD each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly; SATA and enterprise/datacenter drives are excluded, and per-drive posting glitches are filtered (see caveats). 2010–2016: four approximate pre-NVMe anchor points. Live + approximate
HBM spend and cost breakdown quarterly HBM spend ($B) and each component's share (%) of the accelerator bill of materials (HBM, logic, packaging, auxiliary) Epoch AI: 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 defaults to the cheapest retail price in nominal USD (not contract or average; retail lags contract). Use the Real USD toggle for inflation-adjusted values — constant 2024 dollars via US CPI-U annual averages (BLS).
  • 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.

About

Compiled and maintained by David Shim, Stanford DAM project.

Explore all 71 articles in today's digest

Fresh dev news, AI-digested daily. Never miss a trend at devoured.fyi