Power Outage At Micron Plant May Spell RAM Price Hike

It shouldn’t come as any surprise to learn that manufacturing production lines, particularly for PC and/or electrical components, are highly sensitive. As such, any disruption to the line, even for a relatively minimal amount of time, can have huge consequences.

Why are we telling you this though? Well, following a report via TechPowerUp, one of Micron’s biggest memory production facilities (located in Taiwan) has had a one-hour power outage that may not only have resulted in millions of dollars worth of components being ruined, but it may also impact supply so badly that RAM prices for at least the first half of 2021 look likely to increase.

Micron Lose Power – Which May Mean Higher RAM Prices!

So, there was a power cut for one hour, why should that result in such a major problem? – Well, for starters, in these instances it’s usually guaranteed that anything currently on the production line, having been dramatically ceased mid-build, is likely now completely ruined. In a nutshell, you can’t simply fire up the machine again and have it resume from the exact moment it stopped.

It’s a poor analogy, but if you have a power cut while gaming, when you re-boot your PC it doesn’t take you immediately back to where you were in-game. Everything has to be re-loaded, and, overall, it’s pretty much the same for production lines.

What Happens Now?

So, for starters, they’ll have to be a total reset at this Micron plant likely taking production right back to the beginning. As for how long that will take? Well, while we don’t have any exact figures, I think it’s fair to say that it won’t be quick! – From a consumer standpoint, however, it is already being speculated that this one-hour long power cut may see RAM supply cut by around 10% for the next 6 months.

And as often is the case with supply and demand, when there is more of something readily available, the price goes down. When there’s less, it goes up! So, with RAM production and availability being so significantly dropped, the bad news is that this may ultimately result in prices going up until at least mid-2021.

On the plus side, however, the cost of memory has become notably more affordable in the last couple of years, but if you are planning on making an upgrade, you might want to make your purchase sooner rather than later because while we’re not saying that the good times are over, they’re almost certainly not going to get better after this news!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!