No Joke: Big Memory And Flash Price Hikes Coming April 1

March 9, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As I told you about last week, price increases for Power Systems and Storage products have indeed come to pass. We were poo-pooing the idea that IBM would have a 25 percent across-the-board price increase, saying this would be unprecedented and unjustified. But the price increases that go into effect in three weeks (just after the first financial quarter of 2026 ends) are jaw dropping even if they are mainly for main memory and flash drives.

We would love to show you the link to the announcement letter, but as far as we know there is no customer announcement letter (the kind that we can see) for this price increase and only a business partner announcement letter (which we cannot see except through the kindness of strangers). We have, however, confirmed the announcement with two business partners, who supplied us with the PDF documents and XLS spreadsheets with the same data in them (but oddly enough, formatted differently, possibly because they came through two different master resellers).

The Price Action for Power & Storage announcement was dated March 2, and the effective date is April 1. All price increases are in effect worldwide. The letter to business partners states: “Today, IBM announces changes in list prices worldwide on select products. The new prices are effective April 1, 2026. Terms and conditions of existing contracts will determine the applicability and specific effect of the price change. For additional information please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner.”

That’s it.

The spreadsheet has the data. You might want to sit down before you open it, particularly if you need to buy memory or flash, which the hyperscalers and cloud builders have been hoarding, this driving prices up insanely. Like 2X to 3X compared to last year in many cases, and because of the limited supply of memory and flash available to the rest of the world not quite gone mad for GenAI systems, the price hikes are going to be even worse. And it is not like the memory and flash foundries can just double their capacity to keep the prices reasonable – it takes years to build a fab, and tens of billions of dollars. Given the situation, they in fact have no incentive to do so, particularly after the overcapacity in the memory and flash markets a few years back, which caused the manufacturers all kinds of financial heartburn.

Here is that spreadsheet, so you can analyze it yourself.

First, there is a foreign exchange tweak to get prices harmonized between the United States, where IBM consolidates and reports its financial results, and several countries, with the uplifts as follows:

India: 2.9 percent
Poland: 2.7 percent
Sri Lanka: 1.3 percent
Taiwan: 1.3 percent
South Korea: 0.2 percent

The foreign exchange uplift applies to Power10 and Power11 systems, and a slew of FlashSystem, DS8K, SAN Volume Controller, and Spectrum Scale storage, plus the range of IBM tape drives and tape libraries.

With main memory, you must remember that IBM uses DDR4 (discontinued) and DDR5 DRAM chips, but has its own differential memory controller on the Power10 and Power11 chips that makes the memory cards incompatible with the rest of the world. So you can’t just go out and find a clone if you don’t like the price. (This has been true for a long time, but wasn’t always true.)

On the so-called “scale up” Power10 and Power11 systems – what you are I would simply call midrange and high-end Power Systems servers – prices have jumped radically, but flash prices have been increased much more on other parts of the IBM Storage line, so I guess you should be grateful.

To be specific, memory prices have been increased by 55 percent. Pricing on 128 GB memory sticks was already at $122 per GB, which is a bit high considering that 256 GB and 512 GB sticks were only around $70 per GB and 1 TB cards were at just shy of $100 per GB. Now, it is $190 per GB for the skinny 128 GB cards, just shy of $110 per GB for the 256 GB and 512 GB cards, and depending on the machine, $154 per GB or 190 per GB for the 1 TB cards.

On the so-called “scale out” Power10 and Power11 systems – what you and I would simply call entry Power Systems servers because IBM i and AIX shops generally do not build scale out, distributed computing clusters from entry or midrange machines, as happens with X86 and now Arm systems – main memory prices have jumped less radically, by 30 percent. Before the price changes, the 32 GB sticks used in entry P05 systems were around $110 per GB 64 GB and 128 GB memory sticks were around $85 per GB, and 256 GB sticks were around $100 per GB and 512 GB sticks were around $110 per GB. Now it is $142 per GB for the 32 GB sticks, $111 per GB for the 64 GB and 128 GB sticks, $130 per GB for the 128 GB sticks, $130 per GB for the 256 GB sticks, and $142 per GB for the 512 GB sticks.

In the spreadsheet, you can look up any particular machine and its memory module feature codes to get precise pricing.

Price changes for flash storage used internally on Power Systems servers is all over the map. In the entry Power Systems machines, price hikes range from a low of 4 percent to a high of 145 percent for various flash features. The prices of these devices depend on duty cycle and capacity, so there is no way to give a simple cost per gigabyte comparison. On midrange and high-end Power Systems machines, internal flash storage price increases range from 7 percent to 53 percent.

On the high-end DS8K storage arrays, IBM is taking the opportunity to raise prices for controllers (both compute and cache memory), enclosures, management consoles, network adapter cards, cables, and other features by a straight 35 percent, and ditto for the flash drives used in the DS8K. IBM’s enterprise tape library portfolio has a 25 percent price hike, and LTO tape drives have price hikes of 15 percent or 30 percent, depending, with features like enclosures and cables and such getting a 30 percent increase.

On the FlashSystem flash arrays, disk drive prices – yes, I meant HDDs, which is funny – had a 30 percent price increase and so do flash SSDs. You may laugh at the HDD thing, but consider this: About 90 percent of the unit volume of HDD capacity made in the world is consumed by hyperscalers and cloud builders, who use them for cold storage. When they need more cold storage, your HDD prices have to go up. So they are cornering the market in HDDs, SSDs, and DIMMs, and you are paying for it.

Price increases for IBM’s Ready Nodes for its Ceph object and block storage saw crazy, crazy, crazy price increases – like 83 percent to 583 percent, with a lot of them in the multiple hundreds of percents. Meaning, 4X to 5X to 6X the cost before the price change. Ditto with IBM’s hardware to support its Fusion hyperconverged storage, where the price increase on one flash package was increased by 816 percent. (This stands to reason because the Fusion storage is based on Dell PowerEdge servers, and Dell just jacked its own prices.) This sounds like IBM was charging artificially low prices on Ceph and Fusion hardware, which means Power Systems customers were subsidizing this and probably have been for years.

IBM should send you a thank you note for helping it afford to be generous to Red Hat customers.

The business partners we have heard from say that IBM promises to continue to give 30 day warnings on price increases and that there is a chance that Big Blue will have to do more price changes for memory and storage in the second half of 2026.

If you can buy now, do it. You won’t regret it. This supply-demand imbalance is not going away this year, and maybe not next.

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