DRAM Chips Cool Off

The cryptocurrency market had a great run in 2017 with prices surging across the board resulting in big gains not only for investors but also for the cryptocurrency mining industry. The peak season resulted in skyrocketing prices of cryptocurrency mining hardware including DRAM chips.

The cryptocurrency craze resulted in many people and organizations joining the crypto mining trend leading to more demand for mining hardware such as GPUs and DRAM chips. The latter had particularly been experiencing heavy demand from the crypto mining sector as well as the data center and smartphone manufacturing markets.

The cryptocurrency has since then cooled off especially after the cryptocurrency market crash in Q1 of 2018. This has unfortunately translated to slow demand for DRAM chips from the manufacturers of digital currency mining hardware. There has also been slow growth in the smartphone manufacturing market further pumping the breaks on the demand for DRAM chips. This means DRAM prices might drop for the first time in two years.

The declining demand aligns with the slowing cryptocurrency market which seems to be becoming less volatile than it previously was. The impact has also been felt by GPU manufacturers, mainly Nvidia and AMD whose graphics cards had been hot cake for the crypto mining community. These companies have also reported that they have also been experiencing low demand from the cryptocurrency market.

Manufacturers are not surprised by the falling DRAM prices especially since the cryptocurrency market was bound to experience a bearish trend after the massive surge in 2017. Also, memory chip prices tend to fall as efficiency improves over time and production is ramped up. This has been evident especially with the rise of ASIC miners.