Trying to buy DDR5 memory right now apparently means competing with an army of bots, not actual people. According to bot-mitigation firm DataDome, 91% of the traffic hitting one retailer's DDR5 product pages is now coming from automated scraping tools rather than real shoppers, which is roughly ten bot requests for every one legitimate visit.
The figure comes from a post by Jérôme Segura, DataDome's VP of threat research, and builds on a bigger report the company published earlier this year. In a one-hour sample, DataDome found 91 unique DDR5 listings being scraped an average of 551 times each, which works out to a stock check on a given kit roughly every 6.5 seconds. One operation alone reportedly generated over 50,000 requests per hour before DataDome blocked it, and more than 10 million scraping attempts have been blocked in total.
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It's worth noting the 91% figure comes from a single unnamed retailer, and DataDome hasn't shared its sample window or full methodology. Page requests also aren't purchases, so the number is really how hard bots are watching listings rather than how much stock they're actually grabbing. Still, DataDome says the bots aren't limiting themselves to consumer kits either, with scraping activity also hitting industrial memory suppliers and component makers like Amphenol and TE Connectivity.
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Of course, this is all due to the global memory crisis. AMD warned in June that DDR5 prices won't recover until 2028 as AI demand keeps pulling supply away from consumers, and it wasn't long ago that DDR4 prices actually overtook DDR5, a sign of just how upside down the memory market has gotten. Retailers have already been forced to respond.
The worst part is that this is unlikely to ease up soon. TrendForce expects DRAM contract prices to climb even more in the current quarter, and hyperscalers have reportedly already put down deposits against most of next year's DRAM output.
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For anyone actually trying to build a PC, that probably means fewer real shots at getting a kit at a normal price, and more competition from bots than ever before.
