Normally, the DRAM market has buffers: warehouses of emergency stock, excess wafer starts, older DRAM manufacturing machinery being sold off to budget brands while the big brands upgrade their production lines…but not in 2025, in 2025 those would-be buffers were depleted for three separate reasons:

Tariff Chaos. Companies had deliberately reduced how much DRAM they ordered for their safety stock over the summer of 2025 because tariffs were changing almost weekly. Every RAM purchase risked being made at the wrong moment – and so fewer purchases were made.