Mostly greed.

greed

Because people will pay the prices.

Pretty much greed . Limiting production, lower generational hardware performance upgrades, scalpers. Gpus are the main cost these days.

like others mentioned greed
but another thing is PC gaming and gaming in general became way more mainstream during the lockdown, there was almost nothing else to do.

+ yeah people are willing to pay these prices so

Also lion share of materials used in production go into AI tech instead and gaming products have limited materials to use because of that.

- TSM raised prices across the board.
- TSM is the powerhouse in the foundry market.
- AI is at its infant stage which means just like crypto it will gobble up supply.

Right now prices for almost everything is fine except ddr5 ram kits which have increase almost by 100%. I'm just happy that I bought multiple 4000 ddr4 kits back in 2024 when they went on sale.

Tarrifs

They created artificial shortage for RAM kits to drive up the price. Pretty much insane prices now for RAM. So glad I got my 32 GB before this corporate manipulation rubbish.

Many reasons.

First and foremost... because they can and they realized people will still buy anyways.

After COVID died down people went back to the "office" and demand went way down because of this.

The cost of living is way up since 2020 and so is the minimum wage in many regions.

Now you have high demands and they can't make them fast enough because now everyone uses SSDs so flash chips went up in pricing, along with RAM. However RAM is still cheap compared to when DDR5 was new to market.

Flagship CPUs are expensive but considering the ridiculous performance they are worth it.

Many regions tightened the environmental restrictions so that means companies like Western Digital and Samsung along with TSMC and many others are effected on overall output because by local laws they are on water restrictions.

Then their is the high GPU demands because of server farms made up of AI model learning clusters and AI works faster with higher end GPUs.

Microsoft says they have more GPUs on-hand then they have available electricity. Think about that for a moment.

Overall higher prices are here to stay.

$8 Big Mac and what used to be a $150-200 K home is now $500K+

What used to be 600-800 $ Rent is now 1200-1500 $

What used to be a $40K Vehicle is now $65K+

If you want a decent GPU at a decent price.... well you have to search, watch, and have your money ready when it's time to pounce on it.

Prices are slowly returning to normal, I even picked up a 5070 when they hit $500 a few weeks back... maybe I should have waited for this black Friday doh... Will see

And now, of course, all this AI idiocy is driving up all sorts of prices. RAM shortages, GPU shortages, SSD & HDD shortages, chip fab backlogs, etc. . . because they want to build their stupid huge data centers RIGHT NOW, and they need all the chips to do it. Consumers just have to suck it up.

Perhaps raw materials are becoming scarce, hence the price of components, then you add taxes and transport costs...

real reason is the demand of AI.....right now AI is taking almost 45% of the total memory produced in the world.....it needs both types of memory as well....it needs super fast DDR7 for the GPU calculations and it needs DDR5 for the CPU supporting the GPU's......

both have to be crazy high numbers as well....like a 5090 core being put on a PCB with a 128gb of memory just to run AI.....CPU cores needing in some cases 512gb just for a single 64 core CPU.....the learning side is seeing CPU's with a terabyte of active memory for a single server motherboard

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/phison-ceo-confirms-nand-prices-have-more-than-doubled-and-will-continue-to-rise-all-2026-production-already-sold-out-ssds-facing-pricing-apocalypse-throughout-2027

What goes up never goes down.