Zoho co-founder warns soaring memory and AI token costs strain businesses

Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu highlighted the challenge posed by sharply rising computer memory costs and the price of AI tokens, saying they are forcing businesses to reconsider price increases. His comments were triggered by a Tom’s Hardware report documenting up to a 500% surge in memory prices over the last twelve months, with a 64GB DDR5-5600 kit climbing from about $191 to roughly $1,118 and a 128GB DDR5-6400 kit reaching $3,399 from a low of $329.

Vembu explained that many companies have so far avoided transferring these costs to their clients, but that approach is growing harder to sustain. He added that the historic assumption of “free” memory is over, urging developers to adopt more memory-efficient programming languages and smarter compilers, even for AI workloads. The remarks underscore broader concerns about how hardware price volatility could reshape software engineering priorities.