The Memory Supercycle

If you've tried to buy a high-end GPU in January 2026, you've likely noticed two things: stock is non-existent, and street prices are eye-watering. The RTX 5090, ostensibly a $1,999 card, is trading hands for nearly $4,000.

Welcome to the Memory Supercycle.

Unlike the crypto boom of 2021, today's shortage isn't driven by miners solving hashes in a basement. It's driven by the world's largest companies building the "brain" of the internet.

The HBM Vacuum

The culprit is High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

Hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and Microsoft are buying every HBM chip Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron can manufacture. This matters to you because memory manufacturing is a zero-sum game. A wafer allocated to HBM3e for an H100 datacenter GPU is a wafer not allocated to GDDR7 for your gaming rig.

"AI is expected to consume over 20% of total DRAM production in 2026. Prioritizing enterprise silicon is no longer a choice for manufacturers; it's a mandate." — TrendForce Analysis

The Consumer Squeeze

This shift has cascaded down to the consumer market with brutal efficiency:

1. Production Cuts: NVIDIA has reportedly cut RTX 50-series production by 30-40% in Q1 2026. The bottleneck isn't the GPU die; it's the VRAM.
2. Price Hikes: DRAM spot prices have surged 55% compared to late 2025.
3. Legacy Resurgence: We are seeing a bizarre return of "dead" cards. NVIDIA is practically re-launching the RTX 3060 12GB because GDDR6 is easier to source than the GDDR7 required for the new flagship cards.

The Builder's Dilemma

So, what is a local LLM enthusiast to do?

If you are building a rig for inference today, the "old" kings are still valid. A dual RTX 3090 setup (48GB VRAM total) remains the price-to-performance champion for running Llama 3 70B.

However, if you were waiting for the RTX 50-series to stabilize, you might be waiting until 2027. The Memory Supercycle is projected to last at least 18 months.

Our Advice: If you find 24GB+ of VRAM at MSRP, buy it. It's not getting cheaper anytime soon.