Well, the memory makers seem to be unable to lead a calm life: they are constantly thinking of new ways of increasing the prices of their products (which is a pretty natural desire, I should say, because you will hardly find anyone willing to sell at a loss). It seemed that all prices reached the average of $2 for a 128Mbit chip in May and continued their slight reduction. And judging by the market situation nothing promised any price growth in the coming next months (see this story).

However, summer came and the manufacturers started some speculations on the matter, which caused the memory prices to start crawling up a bit. Here is the graph for the 128Mbit DDR266 memory prices:

128Mbit (16M x 8) DDR266 SDRAM

On the picture you can clearly see that the prices have grown up by 10% on the average during the last week. The same thing happens to the other mass chips, such as 256Mbit DDR266 and 128Mbit PC133 ones. Of course, it is still too early to alarm, as the prices have just reached the level of the end of May, however, you should bear in mind that the manufacturers hardly have any actual reasons to increase the prices at all. All of them have quite a lot of chips in stock and this price increase may be caused only by another attempt to artificially level out the demand and supply by increasing the stock. I don’t think the manufacturers will be able to continue like that for long, as the production in reserve has never been a profitable thing to do.