Hynix Fabrication Plants, responsible for roughly 30% of the world’s production of DRAM (DDR3 and GDDR5), has had a massive accident resulting in a fire. Although no casualties were reported, at least two plants (FAB 1 and FAB 2) have been put out of commission indefinitely. This could potentially lead to a butterfly effect around the globe, leading to constrained supplies of the RAM chips that companies the world over, notably nVidia and AMD, use, leading, in turn, to increased prices.

In fact, if you were thinking of, for example, buying a new graphics card, such as nVidia GTX, NOW would be the best time to jump on board, because prices will probably skyrocket in a few months.

Other suppliers of RAM have currently ceased shipments of their memory, waiting to see how far up the market price will go before they resume their shipments.

To those of you who are worried that this would affect the production of PS4, Xbox One, or Wii U, well, so far no reports about that (plus Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo probably front ordered large inventories at fixed rates), but PC CPU and GPU prices might see some northward movement.

[KitGuru News]