Nvidia reportedly warns biggest customers of 15% price hikes on AI servers — memory costs continue to soar
Nvidia has told some of its largest customers that the prices of servers containing its AI chips will rise by more than 15% in many cases, Bloomberg reported on Saturday. The increases will take effect on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year, according to people familiar with the matter, who commented on communications that have not yet been made public. The size of each increase will depend on the chip generation and the memory configuration involved. Companies that build servers under contract for large data center operators, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, have recently notified their customers of the forthcoming increases, the people told Bloomberg.
This is another example of the so-called "RAMageddon" that's gripping the DRAM market, with contract prices having risen at record rates this year. Analysts projected that conventional DRAM contract prices would climb 58% to 63% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 2026, following a Q1 surge of 90% to 95%, as suppliers reallocated capacity toward HBM and server products. SK hynix said in October last year that it had already sold out its entire 2026 memory production capacity, and Samsung and SK hynix raised 2026 HBM3E supply prices by close to 20% before the year began.
AI systems carry enormous memory loadouts, with Nvidia's Rubin GPU shipping with up to 288GB of HBM4 per package, and the NVL72 rack-scale system combines 72 of those GPUs, putting more than 20TB of HBM in a single rack before accounting for the LPDDR attached to its Vera CPUs. With HBM production consuming roughly four times the wafer area of equivalent conventional DRAM, memory has become one of the largest line items in an AI server's bill of materials, and it's continuing to rise at a stratospheric pace.
Ironically, the supply crunch that's now inflating Nvidia's systems is the same one its demand helped to create. The three major memory makers spent this and last year shifting advanced nodes and new capacity toward HBM and high-capacity server DRAM, starving commodity markets in the process. Consumer DDR5 pricing has more than doubled since late 2025 as a result, with a mainstream 32GB DDR5-6000 kit selling for around $392 in August against $110 to $140 a year earlier, according to our RAM price tracker.
Nvidia has already passed rising costs through to consumers, raising prices on GeForce graphics cards earlier this month. The Bloomberg report indicates the same unrelenting pressure has now reached the top of the Nvidia stack, where hyperscalers as well as PC builders will be absorbing the increase. A 15% rise on rack-scale systems that sell for several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands of dollars per rack across deployments that run to thousands of racks.
Nvidia runs a gross margin of roughly 75% non-GAAP, among the highest in the semiconductor industry, and the reported hikes indicate the company intends to pass memory cost inflation on to customers rather than absorb it, which it can more than afford to do. Meanwhile, supply of its accelerators from TSMC still can't meet demand, which limits buyers' immediate leverage.
Whether the increases push hyperscalers further toward AMD's accelerators or their own custom silicon will depend on how quickly those alternatives can absorb displaced demand, and all of them draw HBM from the same three constrained suppliers.