Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu has raised concerns over the sharp rise in computer memory prices, saying the increase, along with the cost of AI tokens, is making it harder to run businesses. Sridhar Vembu was responding to a Tom’s Hardware report that said memory prices have jumped as much as 500% in the past 12 months, with some DDR5 RAM kits now costing nearly 10 times their lowest recorded prices. The Zoho founder said companies have so far tried to avoid passing these higher costs to customers, but added that holding prices steady is becoming increasingly difficult.
Sridhar Vembu: Memory prices have made business ‘very difficult’
Reacting to the report in a post on X, Sridhar Vembu wrote: “Memory prices, along with AI token prices have made business very difficult. We have held back from raising prices but it is becoming hard.”His comments come as memory prices have climbed sharply over the past year. According to historical pricing data cited by Tom’s Hardware, a 64GB DDR5-5600 kit that averaged around $191 in August 2025 was priced at about $1,118 in August 2026, an increase of about 485%.Higher-capacity memory has seen an even bigger jump from its previous lows. A 128GB DDR5-6400 kit was recently listed at $3,399, compared with a lowest tracked price of $329. The increase is not limited to DDR5. DDR4 prices have also risen, with the report showing year-on-year increases ranging from about 120% to 177% across the memory kits it tracked.
Sridhar Vembu says the era of ‘free’ memory is over
In the post, Sridhar Vembu also used the sharp price increase to make a broader point about how software is developed. He argued that programming languages and software tools will have to become more efficient as memory becomes more expensive.“A techncial note: for a long time, programming languages were designed with the assumption that memory is ‘free’. That era has now ended. We need highly memory efficient languages and smarter compilers, even for AI to use,” Vembu wrote.He added: “Safety of code and productivity in writing code cannot come at the expense of memory bloat. That is my area of research.”