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📂 **Category**:
💡 **What You’ll Learn**:
Historic and current memory and storage prices, collected in the spirit of
John C. McCallum’s classic memory-price dataset — interactive, with the raw data downloadable.
Hover for details, click the legend to toggle series, drag or use the slider to zoom, and use the
camera icon to export an image.
Price per gigabyte over time
Historical lowest $/GB on a log scale — one line per memory type:
DRAM, NAND flash, and HBM.
DRAM price by generation
The DRAM line above, broken out by generation across the full history —
Pre-DDR (SDRAM/core), DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4, DDR5. (Generation is inferred from product
descriptions, so older points are approximate.)
Accelerator cost breakdown
Modeled estimates from Epoch AI: quarterly accelerator cost across the four
largest AI-accelerator designers — Nvidia, AMD, Google (TPU) and Amazon (Trainium)
— stacked by component (HBM, logic die, packaging/CoWoS, auxiliary), a
production-volume-weighted average.
HBM price by generation
By HBM generation (HBM2e → HBM3 → HBM3e → HBM4). HBM is sold only to accelerator
makers on confidential contracts — there is no public spot market — so these are
sparse industry-analyst estimates (TrendForce / SemiAnalysis), not transaction
prices. HBM4 is projected (launches Q3 2026). $/TBps is cost per unit of memory bandwidth
(stack price ÷ per-stack bandwidth).
Methodology note. $/GB is the cheapest listed retail price in nominal
USD — not contract, average, inflation-adjusted, or a confirmed sale price. DRAM history is
the McCallum dataset (extended from mid-2024 by Keepa Amazon prices); NAND is Keepa’s cheapest
consumer-NVMe price from 2016 (approximate anchors before); HBM figures are modeled estimates.
Sources are listed below and in the downloadable dataset; please check before citing.
Methodology, sources and caveats
Sources and method
| Category | What we track | Source and method | Reliability |
|---|---|---|---|
| DRAM $/GB | cheapest retail $/GB, overall and by generation (DDR3/DDR4/DDR5) | Deep history (1957–2024): the McCallum memory-price dataset (jcmit.net, via the Internet Archive). Mid-2024 onward: the cheapest new consumer DIMM each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly. |
Reference + live |
| NAND $/GB | cheapest retail SSD $/GB, 2010–present | 2016 onward: the cheapest consumer NVMe SSD each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly; SATA and enterprise/datacenter drives are excluded, and per-drive posting glitches are filtered (see caveats). 2010–2016: four approximate pre-NVMe anchor points (no McCallum-equivalent flash dataset exists). |
Live + approximate |
| HBM spend and cost breakdown | quarterly HBM spend ($B) and each component’s share (%) of the accelerator bill of materials (HBM, logic, packaging, auxiliary) |
Epoch AI (CC-BY): a modeled estimate, production-volume-weighted across the four largest accelerator designers (Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon); aggregate only, no per-company split. |
External estimate |
| HBM $/GB by generation | HBM price per GB and per TB/s of bandwidth, by generation | Industry-analyst estimates — TrendForce and SemiAnalysis (HBM has no public spot market); bandwidth from JEDEC/Rambus. HBM4 is projected. |
Sparse estimate |
Caveats
- $/GB is the cheapest retail price in nominal USD — not contract, average, or
inflation-adjusted, and retail lags contract pricing. - The cheapest listing often tracks an end-of-life generation being cleared out,
not the leading edge — the per-generation chart shows this. - These are cheapest listed prices over time (via Keepa), not confirmed
sales. For the SSD data, obvious posting errors are removed — any month a drive is listed
more than 60% below its own typical price (e.g. a $130 SSD shown at $4) is dropped. - The DRAM line splices two sources at mid-2024 (McCallum → Keepa); a small step
there is expected, since Amazon’s cheapest clearance can sit below McCallum’s representative low. - HBM figures are modeled estimates (cost share and spend), not measured prices.
Updates
DRAM and NAND $/GB refresh monthly from Keepa; HBM updates quarterly (Epoch AI).
The McCallum backbone and HBM estimates are fixed. The downloadable
CSV lists every point with its source.
About
Compiled and maintained by David Shim, Stanford DAM project. Questions or corrections:
hsshim@stanford.edu.
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