Last week, the first rumors emerged that AMD was considering increasing recommended prices of its graphics cards in response to climbing prices of GDDR6 memory. Today, a leak by @harukaze5719 on X/Twitter could indicate the magnitude of the increase that AMD is planning to implement. If the rumor holds true, the company could increase recommended prices of its Radeon RX graphics cards with 8GB of memory by $20 and graphics boards with 16GB of memory by $40. The information is strictly unofficial, but may have some merit if we look at market trends.
8GB of GDDR6 memory was priced around $19.54 ($2.443 per 8 Gb chip) on the spot market on July 1, 2025, according to DRAMeXchange. The spot price of 8GB of GDDR6 today, December 2, is around $31.52 ($3.94 per 8 Gb chip), an increase of 61% in less than half of a year. Prices of 16 Gb GDDR6 memory ICs aren’t as easy to find, but normally they should be about two times more expensive than their 8 Gb counterparts, which means that it costs over $62 to equip a graphics card with 16GB of GDDR6.
An avid reader may argue that as a large consumer of GDDR memories, AMD purchases memory in large volumes on long-term contracts, which smooths out sudden price changes. Yet the volumes of GDDR6 memory that AMD is likely to buy for graphics cards aren’t that large these days: the company sold 740,000 discrete graphics processors for desktops in Q1, followed by 700,000 units in Q2 and 840,000 standalone GPUs for desktops in Q3, based on data from Jon Peddie Research. Getting huge discounts is hard if you do not buy a lot.
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Furthermore, since we are dealing with a structural DRAM market change and as leading producers of memory clearly allocate more of their capacity for HBM memory aimed at AI accelerators, commodity DRAMs like GDDR6 are poised to get more expensive.