Ongoing RAM and SSD shortages are reshaping the PC building market, and fresh sales figures from Germany highlight just how sharply demand is cooling. With memory and storage prices climbing again, more shoppers are holding off on new builds, and that hesitation is now showing up in CPU and motherboard sales that look dramatically weaker than last year.
The current DRAM and SSD supply crunch has fueled additional price hikes across the wider PC ecosystem. Graphics cards, pre-built desktops, laptops, and plenty of everyday electronics have all been impacted. In some areas, even CPUs have felt the pressure, though processors have generally remained one of the more stable categories compared to GPUs, RAM, and SSDs. Still, even CPU sales are starting to slow, and the reason is straightforward: when RAM and storage become significantly more expensive, the total cost of a new PC build jumps enough that many buyers simply pause or walk away.
Recent sales data from German retailer Mindfactory paints a stark picture. Over a two-week span, total CPU sales are barely getting past 1,000 units. AMD accounts for most of the movement with 860 units sold, while Intel trails at around 140 units. AMD still holds the lead, but the bigger story is the overall drop in demand. Compared with the retailer’s CPU sales earlier in 2025, the decline is massive—shipments are described as nearly 25 times lower than January 2025 levels. Even during historically slow periods, the market used to look healthier. For example, sales in a weak month like July 2025 were still reportedly above 13,000 CPU units in a single week, making today’s figures unusually low by comparison.
This trend isn’t limited to one store. CPU sales on Amazon are also said to be sliding, and tracking shared by analyst TechEpiphanyYT points to a consistent weekly decline throughout 2026 so far. One example shows that in the second week of February, Mindfactory CPU shipments were near 1,500 units, but when looking at the combined totals for the following two weeks, sales fell by about half, reinforcing the idea that the slowdown is not a one-off dip but a continuing pattern.
Motherboards are falling even faster. Where weekly shipments in 2024 commonly ranged from roughly 3,000 to 5,000 units, they’ve now dropped to just over 1,000 units as of the last week of March. TechEpiphanyYT noted that in a decade of tracking hardware trends, this is one of the steepest declines observed. The analysis suggests the downturn accelerated with a wave of market disruption linked to “AI slop,” which has made the broader PC component landscape more volatile and building a PC more difficult and expensive—conditions that don’t appear to be improving yet.
Taken together, the numbers suggest a market where consumers aren’t just switching brands or waiting for the next CPU launch—they’re postponing builds entirely. And as long as RAM and SSD pricing remains elevated, both CPU and motherboard demand may continue to soften, especially among mainstream builders who are most sensitive to total system cost.
