There is a certain bleak irony in the story of Myrient. A volunteer-run archive dedicated to preserving gaming history is being erased from the internet, not by legal pressure from rights holders, but by the same technology industry whose insatiable appetite for computing power is remaking the global economy. As of March 31, one of the largest freely accessible repositories of classic video games will go dark, a direct casualty of the AI infrastructure boom driving up the cost of every hard drive, SSD, and stick of RAM on the planet.
As reported by Tom's Hardware, Myrient, one of the largest online video game archives, announced it will shut down on March 31, 2026. Founded in October 2022 by a user known simply as Alexey, Myrient has remained ad-free, paywall-free, and login-free since it first emerged three years ago, relying on a small pool of donations to keep the site online. The ambition behind it was considerable. What made it one of the largest repositories of classic games was that anyone was free to upload content the site needed, meaning Myrient could list a game it required for safekeeping, and millions of gamers worldwide could pitch in and submit a copy of their legally purchased title.
The creator said that donations are not keeping pace with hosting costs, and that they are paying more than $6,000 out of pocket per month to cover expenses, which is hardly sustainable. Traffic to the site actually grew over the past year, yet the funding base did not grow with it. That gap, month after month, proved impossible to bridge from personal finances alone.
Aside from that, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have been steadily rising due to the AI infrastructure build-out, resulting in higher hosting expenses for Myrient as well. The scale of that price pressure is worth examining carefully, because it extends well beyond any single archive. Western Digital and Seagate have confirmed their entire 2026 hard drive production is sold out to AI data centres, leaving no inventory for other customers. Consumer hard drive prices have surged nearly 50% in five months, with a 4TB WD Blue drive now costing $99 compared to $67 to $85 previously. On the memory side, the picture is similarly stark. In Q4 2025, contract prices for key DRAM chips saw unprecedented jumps, with contract 16Gb DDR5 chips going from around $6.84 in September 2025 to around $27.20 in December 2025, a nearly 300% increase in three months.
Data centres will consume 70 per cent of memory chips made in 2026, and once-cheap SSDs, DRAM, and HDD prices are climbing fast as AI demand and constrained supply converge to create the tightest market in years. For a project like Myrient, which needed substantial and affordable storage capacity just to remain functional, the timing could hardly have been worse. The archiving site said it needed "necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure," which it cannot afford due to memory chip and storage shortages.
Hardware costs were not the only pressure. The creator also complained about abusive users who were monetising Myrient content. Not only did they bypass the donation messages and the site's built-in download protections, but they also added a paywall that defeated the site's policy against paywalls. The archive had always operated on the principle that commercial exploitation of its content was strictly forbidden. Finding third parties profiting from its openness, while its founder absorbed thousands of dollars in monthly costs, appears to have been the final straw.
The preservation community has reacted with concern. While some have noted the irony of blaming AI for the closure, there is a solid argument that Myrient was doing an important job for video game preservation. Many of its collections host titles that are legally available on modern systems, but sites like Myrient play an important role because many intellectual property holders no longer exist, and their games would be at risk of being lost forever without ROM-sharing portals. Many titles are also unlikely to be re-released due to the expiration of decades-old licensing deals.
That argument deserves genuine consideration, even if the legal status of such archives remains genuinely contested. Copyright law, as it stands in Australia and elsewhere, does not carve out broad exceptions for digital preservation by private individuals, regardless of the cultural merit involved. The Australian Attorney-General's Department has acknowledged the tension between copyright protection and preservation access in past reviews, and the debate is ongoing. Institutional archives like the National Library of Australia operate under specific legislative provisions that private operators do not enjoy. The fact that Myrient has existed in a legal grey zone does not diminish the genuine cultural loss its closure represents, but it does complicate any call for government intervention to save it.
The harder question raised by Myrient's closure is whether the current model for preserving digital culture is sustainable at all. Volunteer-run archives, funded by small donations and operated out of personal goodwill, are increasingly exposed to market forces they cannot control. Nearly every analyst firm and memory maker is now warning of looming NAND and DRAM shortages that will send SSD and memory prices skyrocketing over the coming months and years, with some predicting a shortage that will last a decade. If that forecast holds, the economics that killed Myrient will squeeze other volunteer-run archives too.
The site's Discord server and Telegram channel will remain accessible, so there is still a place for gamers and preservationists to come together to discuss saving their favourite titles. Users have until the end of March to download what they can, though the scale of the task is formidable. The archive's 390-plus terabytes of content is not something any individual user can easily replicate at home, particularly given current storage prices. Organisations like the Internet Archive in the United States have fought legal battles of their own in recent years, highlighting just how precarious digital preservation efforts are, even for well-resourced institutions.
The closure of Myrient sits at an uncomfortable intersection of competing legitimate interests: the property rights of copyright holders, the cultural imperative to preserve history before it vanishes, and the economic reality that the AI boom is redirecting the world's storage and memory supply toward the highest bidder. Reasonable people will disagree about where exactly those lines should be drawn, and whether Myrient was on the right side of them. What is harder to dispute is that when the infrastructure costs of preserving knowledge rise beyond what volunteers can bear, and institutional alternatives are either legally restricted or simply absent, something is genuinely lost. The question of who should bear that cost, and who should decide what is worth keeping, is one the technology sector and policymakers have yet to seriously answer. Myrient's shutdown gives it fresh urgency.