From Washington: In a development that will reverberate across every desk, dorm room, and small-business back office on the planet, the global memory crisis has acquired a new and distinctly predatory dimension. Web-scraping bots, powered in part by AI tools, are systematically hunting down scarce DDR5 RAM stock across e-commerce sites so their operators can snap it up and flip it at a profit. The practice is not illegal in most jurisdictions, but it is making an already stressed supply chain considerably worse.
Online security firm DataDome reports that its Galileo threat team detected a single large-scale scraping operation that submitted more than 10 million requests in a bid to locate sellers carrying desirable DRAM inventory. The bots were pinging DRAM product pages roughly every 6.5 seconds, hitting those pages at a rate nearly six times higher than legitimate users and search-engine crawlers. To stay ahead of retailers, the scrapers used a technique called cache busting, which appends unique parameters to each page request so servers are forced to serve fresh inventory data rather than a stored copy. They also deliberately throttled their request rate to avoid triggering anti-bot defences.
Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome, told The Register that criminal actors are increasingly layering AI tools into their operations.
"AI is unique in that it gives leverage from script kiddies all the way to professional scrapers."The bots themselves are not clicking "buy"; the goal is intelligence gathering so human operators can move quickly once stock is confirmed. According to DataDome, the end game is straightforward: corner limited DDR5 inventory and resell it at a premium, further depleting supply for ordinary consumers and businesses.
The scalping campaign is taking place against a backdrop that was already alarming well before the first bot fired a request. DDR5 memory prices have been climbing sharply since November 2025, driven by insatiable demand from hyperscalers and AI infrastructure operators who are absorbing the lion's share of global high-end DRAM production. Major memory manufacturers, including Samsung and SK Hynix, have shifted production toward high-bandwidth and high-capacity server memory, leaving general-purpose consumer modules in chronically short supply.
The consequences, according to research firm Gartner, are serious enough to reshape the consumer technology market for years. Gartner forecasts a 130% surge in combined DRAM and SSD prices by the end of 2026, which it expects to translate into a 17% increase in PC prices and a 13% increase in smartphone prices compared to 2025 levels, as reported by GameSpot. Global PC shipments are projected to fall 10.4% in 2026, described by Gartner Senior Director Analyst Ranjit Atwal as "the steepest contraction in device shipments witnessed in over a decade." Smartphone shipments face an 8.4% decline over the same period.
The most striking forecast is the fate of the entry-level PC. "This sharp increase removes vendors' ability to absorb costs, making low-margin entry-level laptops nonviable," Atwal says, predicting that "the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028." That price bracket is the one most families, students, and small businesses rely on for basic computing needs. Once it disappears, the minimum cost of entry to the PC market moves decisively upward.
Cloud hosting providers are already feeling the pressure. German cloud vendor Hetzner recently raised its prices in response to tighter memory availability, a move that signals the cost is being passed along the entire supply chain. Two of the three major global storage manufacturers have reportedly filled all production orders for 2026, according to GameSpot's reporting, leaving mid-tier and smaller vendors with little room to manoeuvre.
There is a reasonable counter-argument to the more apocalyptic readings of these forecasts. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure is exerting significant pressure on the memory ecosystem, and the shortage is partly driven by a reallocation of manufacturing capacity away from consumer electronics toward high-margin memory solutions; major memory makers have shifted production toward memory used in AI data centres, such as high-bandwidth memory and high-capacity DDR5. That reallocation is a rational market response to where the money is. Capacity will eventually follow profit signals back toward consumer markets, and new fabrication plants being built by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are expected to add meaningful output by the late 2020s, even if they offer no near-term relief.
Gartner's Atwal also warns that higher prices will narrow the range of devices available, prompting buyers to hold onto devices for longer and fundamentally altering upgrade cycles, with PC lifetimes expected to increase by 15% for business buyers and 20% for consumers by the end of 2026, raising concerns about security vulnerabilities and the challenges of managing older hardware. That security dimension is not trivial: devices running outdated operating systems are a well-documented attack vector, and if financial pressure keeps millions of machines on aging software, the downstream costs to individuals and governments could be substantial.
For Australian consumers and businesses, the implications are direct. PC and laptop prices in Australia track global component costs closely, meaning the price hikes already hitting US and European markets will arrive here with little delay. Australians upgrading home offices, buying devices for children starting secondary school, or equipping small businesses should factor in the likelihood that today's prices are lower than what awaits them in six to twelve months. The scalpers are not making that calculation easier.
The harder question is structural. The DRAM shortage is a textbook case of competing legitimate demands: AI infrastructure genuinely requires enormous amounts of memory, and the companies building it are making commercially rational decisions. The problem is that those decisions are concentrating a finite resource in ways that price ordinary people out of basic computing. Whether governments should treat memory supply chains as a matter of strategic economic policy, the way some treat food security or energy, is a question that deserves more serious attention than it has received so far. There are no easy answers, but the disappearance of the affordable PC would be a concrete and measurable harm to the people least able to absorb it.