5 Memory Stocks Surging on High RAM Prices (And 4 ETFs)

Byexpertzeeshan

This article originally appeared in NerdWallet’s investing newsletter, the Nerdy Investor. You can subscribe for free here.

Have you shopped for a new laptop or smartphone lately? It’s getting rough out there.

A survey published earlier this year by Gartner projected average PC prices would rise by 17% this year, and average phone prices by 13%, with cheaper models paradoxically seeing the biggest price increases.

Why? Two words: Memory crisis.

The price of computer memory chips (called random-access memory, or RAM) is going through the roof because of skyrocketing demand from AI data centers. And while that’s bad for shoppers, it’s good for shareholders of certain memory chip stocks and ETFs.

Why does AI need so much memory, anyway?

If you’ve been playing with AI for a while, you may remember that chatbots used to lack object permanence, like a newborn. Up until a couple of years ago, even the best AI models could remember, at best, the last few messages you’d sent them. They had zero recollection of previous conversations.

Now, it’s different. AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have realized that consumers want to be able to have long conversations and tackle complex projects with their AI models, without having the models lose coherence and forget what they’re doing midway through. And consumers want to be able to come back to old conversations and projects over multiple days.

That means the models need to be able to “remember” things, to put it anthropomorphically. Or, more accurately, the models need to have much longer context windows.

Hence the RAM bottleneck. Memory chip makers are using up all their production capacity fulfilling huge orders of high-end chips for AI data centers, which is starving the consumer electronics supply chain (particularly the budget segment) of normal memory chips. And industry experts only expect the bottleneck to get worse in the next couple of years. In a recent earnings call, Samsung CFO Soon-Chul Park said that “the supply shortage will persist through 2028.”

Again, this is bad for anyone who wants a cheap phone or laptop. But it’s great for certain memory chip stocks and ETFs.

» Phones are pricey, but there are ways to save on phone bills: Read about 7 ways to do so

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Disk, Device, Grass

Top 5 memory chip stocks by 1-year returns

Below is a table of the 5 best-performing stocks in the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), the Tuttle Capital Concentrated Memory Stack ETF (HBMX), the Kurv Memory Select ETF (KMEM) and the Tema Memory ETF (DISK), ranked by one-year returns.

The best-performing memory chip stock by one-year return is Sandisk Corp (SNDK), which is up 3150.61%.

Ticker

Company

Performance (Year)

SNDK

Sandisk Corp

3,150.61%

MU

Micron Technology Inc

664.33%

WDC

Western Digital Corp

540.58%

AEHR

Aehr Test Systems

511.61%

STX

Seagate Technology Holdings Plc

487.16%

Source: Finviz. Data is current as of August 13, 2026, and is intended for informational purposes only.

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