Sector · 29.4% of the indexinteractive version →
Computing.
Geometric blend: processing ($/GFLOPS, 60%), disk ($/GB, 30%), RAM ($/GB, 10%).
-99.99999%
since 1990
-36.7%/yr
annual rate
$100
buys: 8,130 GFLOPS (8.1 TFLOPS)
Then: A GFLOP of compute cost roughly a million dollars. A gigabyte of disk: $9,000.
Now: A penny buys the GFLOP; the gigabyte costs one cent.
Moore's Law, then GPUs, then the AI accelerator boom — a roughly nine-million-fold composite decline, the steepest in economic history. One honest wrinkle: memory and storage prices turned UP in late 2025 on AI datacenter demand.
The series, year by year
| Year | Computing | CPI-U |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| 1991 | 65.07 | 105.4 |
| 1992 | 42.34 | 109.8 |
| 1993 | 25.08 | 113.1 |
| 1994 | 14.85 | 116.1 |
| 1995 | 10.56 | 119.3 |
| 1996 | 5.25 | 121.9 |
| 1997 | 2.61 | 124.7 |
| 1998 | 0.897 | 128.0 |
| 1999 | 0.309 | 132.4 |
| 2000 | 0.106 | 136.0 |
| 2001 | 0.0553 | 138.9 |
| 2002 | 0.0288 | 141.1 |
| 2003 | 0.0151 | 143.3 |
| 2004 | 0.0109 | 143.4 |
| 2005 | 0.00909 | 144.4 |
| 2006 | 0.00759 | 146.3 |
| 2007 | 0.00633 | 149.3 |
| 2008 | 0.00308 | 152.9 |
| 2009 | 0.00149 | 155.7 |
| 2010 | 0.000835 | 159.3 |
| 2011 | 0.000477 | 161.2 |
| 2012 | 0.000237 | 163.5 |
| 2013 | 0.000117 | 165.9 |
| 2014 | 0.0000810 | 168.6 |
| 2015 | 0.0000559 | 175.5 |
| 2016 | 0.0000387 | 181.5 |
| 2017 | 0.0000267 | 187.3 |
| 2018 | 0.0000260 | 192.7 |
| 2019 | 0.0000253 | 197.3 |
| 2020 | 0.0000246 | 201.5 |
| 2021 | 0.0000198 | 210.9 |
| 2022 | 0.0000159 | 227.8 |
| 2023 | 0.0000136 | 237.1 |
| 2024 | 0.0000121 | 243.5 |
| 2025 | 0.0000108 | 250.1 |
Sources
Cost-of-computing record · Komorowski / Backblaze · McCallum. Every datapoint's provenance and verification status is public in the anchor ledger on GitHub.