Avito: Demand for Used SSDs and RAM Surges in Russia Amid AI-Driven Shortage

The artificial intelligence boom has unexpectedly hit ordinary computer buyers in Russia. While manufacturers and suppliers divert memory and storage to AI infrastructure, users are increasingly turning to the secondhand market for SSDs and RAM.

Why demand has shifted

In the second half of 2025, memory and storage prices began climbing fast. By 2026, the shortage was visible not only to server builders but to ordinary users too. The reason is that the AI infrastructure market is absorbing huge volumes of components: servers, training clusters and storage systems need the same categories of hardware as consumer devices. When supply shifts in that direction, retail gets less stock at higher prices.

In Russia, local factors amplified the effect. Complicated logistics, importers' shortage of foreign-currency liquidity, the exit of some direct vendors and panic buying fed by news of further price hikes all add pressure. As a result, it is not only individual memory modules or SSDs that cost more, but also finished laptops, PCs, tablets and smartphones.

For buyers, this means one simple thing: upgrading home hardware now depends not only on the exchange rate but also on how many resources the global market diverts to AI systems.

• AI servers and data centers take a significant share of memory and flash storage
• Imports and logistics in Russia make the shortage more noticeable than on the global market
• Rising prices push buyers to upgrade through the secondhand market rather than the store
• Prices are rising not only for components but for all devices that use memory and SSDs

The secondhand numbers

The most noticeable shift is visible on resale platforms. According to Avito, from December 2025 to February 2026, sales of used SSDs grew 5.5x year over year. RAM sales nearly doubled over the same period, and hard drives gained 43%. This looks like a direct signal: some buyers are no longer waiting for new hardware prices to fall and are choosing what they can buy here and now.

Interestingly, demand is growing not only for used components. New SSDs on the same platform saw sales rise by roughly 150% over the year, and new RAM modules by 67%. The scale of secondhand supply is already huge: for a single RAM-related search query alone, the platform hosts more than 100 thousand listings nationwide. This shows the market has already adapted to the shortage and built an alternative supply channel for those unwilling to overpay at retail.

The picture is mixed among other players. Wildberries reported strong turnover growth for new internal SSDs, RAM and hard drives in January-February 2026. Distributors, however, see the situation less optimistically: in monetary terms the market may have held steady, while unit sales fell because of the price spike. This is especially visible in memory, where, by market participants' estimates, the drop in units reaches 40–50%.

"In monetary terms, sales remained at the same level."

The price of saving

The reason for the secondhand boom is simple: the price gap has become too large to ignore. According to Avito's estimate, used components cost on average about 2.5 times less than new ones. For a buyer who needs to revive a laptop, add memory to a work PC or quickly replace a failed drive, this is often the only rational option. As an example, the market shows RAM for about 5 thousand rubles versus 13 thousand for a new equivalent, and an SSD for about 4 thousand versus 8 thousand rubles in a store.

But these savings come with a notable risk. With SSDs and HDDs, a seller can hide the real degree of wear, and diagnostic utilities do not always reveal the full usage history. Memory is no better: it is technically possible to swap the chips for cheaper or lower-capacity ones and pass the module off as a different configuration. For the average buyer, this means one simple thing: the secondhand market saves money but demands far more checking than an ordinary retail purchase.

What this means

The SSD and RAM story shows that AI now affects not only the accelerator and data center market but also basic consumer components. When the AI sector starts to "vacuum up" memory and storage, the secondhand market wins, and ordinary users pay either with money or with extra risk. For the market, this is an important marker: the AI infrastructure boom has stopped being an abstraction and directly changes the behavior of mass-market electronics buyers.