By Gilles Thiebaut, senior vice president, worldwide hybrid cloud sales, HPE
Publication Date: 2026-03-30 08:01:00
Partner Content The economics of enterprise infrastructure are changing faster than any organization would have expected. Virtualization licensing models are changing and memory prices have increased dramatically. After years of steady declines, DRAM prices rose sharply starting in 2024 as demand for AI infrastructure accelerated. According to TrendForce, average DRAM prices increased approximately 53 percent in 2024 and are expected to have risen another 35 percent in 2025, reversing cost trends that 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 90 to 95 percent quarter-on-quarter by early 2026, as hyperscalers and AI infrastructure absorb an increasing share of global supply.
For infrastructure teams, that change is important. Memory capacity greatly influences virtualization density, VM consolidation rates, and the economics of computing cluster expansion…
