Sales down 60% in January compared to the same period last year!
This news will come as no surprise to anyone - and especially to those who follow hardware news closely - but it does confirm the very poor state of personal computing and, more specifically, component retail sales. While the DRAM market has been experiencing impressive inflation since September, and NAND memory is not far behind, it is in fact the whole chain that is affected. There are, of course, the devices that directly use such components - many computer manufacturers, for example, announced price increases between the end of last year and the beginning of this year - but there are also all the segments that simply depend on the sale of these components.
Processor sales on Amazon 12/2024 - 01/2026 © 3DCenter
The example of processors is symptomatic. On paper, there's nothing to link the sale of processors to that of DRAM or NAND chips. Yet the figures are clear. Relayed by the 3DCenter site, these figures come from the US section of the Amazon retailer, but the observation is established by other sources. For the month of January 2026, compared with sales in January 2025, we're talking about a 59% drop in volume for processors: 26,100 processors were sold in January 2026, compared with 6,3480 in January 2025. In terms of value, it's not much better: this time, we're talking about $8.13 million in January 2026, compared with $18.9 million in January 2025. The drop is impressive.
However, it's in no way abnormal, given that there was already a sharp drop in sales as early as December 2025: 44,400 processors sold compared with 8,400 a year earlier, in December 2024. If we dig a little deeper, we can see that the fall began in November, whereas the end-of-year festivities generally tend to boost sales. You don't have to look far for the explanation: the CPU market isn't directly linked to the DRAM market, but when you want to buy a modern processor, you also want to accompany it with RAM modules, especially as all recent processors require DDR5, which is particularly difficult to find at a decent price. For want of being able to take all the parts, buyers prefer to take none of them, and the only processors that can be easily snapped up today are those of older generations: we've seen a resurgence in chips like the Ryzen 7 5800X, and even the Ryzen 5 3600. These are chips that don't require DDR4 and are content with much less expensive platforms.
