RAM prices are sky high because of AI slop videos, and I can’t take it anymore

I wanted to upgrade my PC last weekend. Nothing fancy, just enough RAM to run my usual spread of browser tabs, Photoshop, and being prepared for when GTA 6 finally comes out. Then I saw the prices.

Sixteen gigabytes of DDR5 memory that cost ₹6,000 last year? Now ₹15,000. Thirty-two gigs? Don’t even look. I stared at my shopping cart like it had personally betrayed me, then did what any rational person would do: I went down a rabbit hole to figure out who was responsible for this disaster.

Turns out, I found my villain. It’s not crypto miners this time, or even the GPU shortage all over again. It’s something far stupider: an endless tsunami of AI-generated garbage videos flooding every corner of the internet.

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The slop factory never sleeps

You’ve seen them. Maybe you’ve even hate-watched a few at 3 a.m. when the algorithm decided you needed to see a photorealistic polar bear at your porch with a Bazooka, or Mahatma Gandhi fighting Stephen Hawking in a WWE ring. They’re everywhere – YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, platforms you didn’t know existed until they started serving you AI slop in your search results.

RAM prices are $800 so that your dad can send you this with the caption “lol” pic.twitter.com/5tKn0kUMsk

— Jake (@JustJake) December 28, 2025

Here’s the problem: making these videos requires absurd amounts of computational power. Not just your gaming rig struggling to run the latest AAA title at max settings – we’re talking entire data centers packed with servers, each one stuffed with high-bandwidth memory running at full tilt to render a video of a tiger that looks almost but not quite right explaining stock market tips.

And who’s making all this content? Everyone. Aspiring influencers who discovered they can pump out a hundred videos a day without learning to use a camera. Marketing agencies churning out “personalized” ads. Content farms that realized AI video is cheaper than paying humans to hold products and smile. The barrier to entry dropped to zero, and now we’re drowning in synthetic media that nobody asked for.

My RAM hostage situation

The demand for server-grade RAM has gone absolutely nuclear. The same memory modules that power AI video generation also happen to share manufacturing capacity with consumer RAM. Factories that could be making the memory I need for my desktop are instead prioritizing high-margin enterprise orders, because when you can sell to a company generating garbage videos at industrial scale, why bother with someone who just wants to multitask between work applications without their computer having an existential crisis?

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I’m not some Luddite who thinks AI is evil. I’ve used it for work. It’s legitimately helpful sometimes. But there’s a difference between using AI to transcribe meetings or automate tedious tasks and generating an infinite scroll of videos where a photorealistic Mahatma Gandhi explains cryptocurrency. One serves a purpose. The other is pollution, digital pollution that’s now literally making my hardware more expensive.

And the worst part? These videos aren’t even good. They’re uncanny, obviously synthetic, the kind of thing that makes you feel vaguely uncomfortable if you watch for more than ten seconds. But they’re optimized for engagement, which means they’re optimized to waste your time just long enough to serve you an ad. They exist purely to generate clicks, views, ad revenue – a closed loop of value extraction that benefits nobody except the platforms hosting them and the companies selling the servers to make them.

The future is stupid

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with 16GB of RAM from 2019, watching my computer wheeze every time I open Spotify while a YouTube tab is running, knowing that somewhere out there, a server rack is working overtime to generate video number 47,000 in a series called “What if characters from Ramayan had smartphones?”

I just want reasonably priced RAM. Is that really too much to ask? Apparently, yes. Because the future isn’t flying cars or fusion power, it’s an economy that prioritizes infinite AI slop over letting regular people afford computer parts and I hate it here.

Also read: NASA Athena supercomputer explained: It’s much faster than your PC!