Unless you happen to live with a software engineer or avid gamer, you may not be aware of the current shortage in computer RAM—which your resident computer expert may be calling RAMageddon or the RAMpocalypse.

The RAM shortage is a familiar story if you’ve ever dealt with capitalism. The demand for memory, specifically dynamic random access memory (DRAM), has increased dramatically because of the rise of AI data centers. AI companies have been buying up the global supply of these memory chips in anticipation of creating future networks. Unfortunately, the computer chip industry has not been able to scale up its supply, in part because of bottlenecks around certain specialized components that aren’t widely manufactured.

The upshot is that computer memory chip prices have skyrocketed. Memory chips are now sold “like lobsters in a restaurant,” in that the prices are so volatile, they change from day to day.

For most of us, this feels more like an academic concern than a problem that deserves to be called an apocalypse. Unless you are constructing your own personal computer or you’re a gamer who can no longer afford the latest gaming console, the high price of RAM seems pretty unrelated to your life.

But when the cost of memory chips increases as much as fivefold in a short time, the downstream effects don’t remain localized to one industry. Here’s how surging RAM prices may affect your life.

If this RAM shortage had occurred 30 years ago, the fallout would have almost exclusively affected personal computing and gaming.

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