Over the past three months, the craziest gains in the global financial markets came from an unexpected place—not US stocks, not gold, not silver, and not even BTC, but an unassuming RAM stick.

SanDisk surged 24% in a single day on January 6, marking the biggest intraday increase in ten months. Even more astonishing, the entire storage market entered a full-blown price hike frenzy starting in January 2026. The price of a single 256GB DDR5 server memory stick directly broke through 40,000 yuan, quadrupling in just three months. Imagine a box of 100 high-end memory modules valued at 4 million yuan—that's equivalent to a house.

Why is this happening? The core reason is simple—the AI era has arrived, and the demand for storage has exploded. Merchants in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other cities are frantically stockpiling, with consumer-grade 2×16GB DDR5 RAM doubling in price within half a year. As a result, mainstream manufacturers like Xiaomi and Lenovo have officially announced that their 2026 new products will see a 10%-15% price increase due to rising costs.

This wave of price hikes has spread throughout the entire supply chain. Cars, personal computers, digital cameras, TVs—any product that requires memory cannot escape. When the return on investment for a single RAM stick outperforms gold, silver, and Rolex, you can't help but ask: Is this a genuine release of demand in the AI era, or another tulip bubble like the Dutch Golden Age? Or is it simply the cost of human societal progress?