By Gilles Thiebaut
Publication Date: 2026-03-30 09:00:00
Enterprise infrastructure economics are changing faster than any organization might have expected. Virtualization licensing models are shifting, and memory prices have risen dramatically. After years of steady declines, DRAM prices rose sharply beginning in 2024 as demand from AI infrastructure accelerated. According to TrendForce, average DRAM prices increased approximately 53 percent in 2024 and are expected to have risen a further 35 percent in 2025, reversing the cost trends infrastructure planners had relied on for more than a decade.
More recently, the market has tightened further. TrendForce projects that server DRAM contract prices could rise as much as 90–95 percent quarter-over-quarter in early 2026, as hyperscalers and AI infrastructure absorb a growing share of global supply.
For infrastructure teams, that shift matters. Memory capacity heavily influences virtualization density, VM consolidation ratios, and the economics of expanding compute clusters. When DRAM prices move this sharply, the cost model behind many enterprise environments changes with it.
These pressures are beginning to reshape how infrastructure teams think about virtualization environments and long-term capacity planning.
At the same time, demand for compute and data services continues to grow…
