If you have shopped for a new laptop, phone, or game console anytime in the last few months, you have probably felt a small jolt at the checkout screen. The specs look familiar. The brand is the same one you have always trusted. But the price tag is not the one you remember from last year, and in a lot of cases, it is not even close.
That is not ordinary inflation, and it is not a marketing gimmick either. It comes down to a single component sitting inside almost every piece of electronics you own: memory chips. Specifically, DRAM and NAND flash, the parts that let your devices store and retrieve data. Right now, the artificial intelligence industry wants nearly all of it, and it is willing to pay far more for it than you are.
The Numbers Are Almost Hard to Believe
Market watchers at TrendForce had penciled in a 55 to 60 percent jump in contract DRAM prices for the first quarter of 2026. That would have been a rough quarter on its own. Instead, actual prices blew past the forecast, climbing somewhere between 90 and 95 percent in those same three months.
Samsung’s own numbers tell the same story from a different angle. In its May earnings report, the company disclosed that its average memory selling price, blending DRAM and NAND together, had jumped about 146 percent compared with its full-year 2025 average. Samsung currently controls roughly 38 percent of the global DRAM market, with SK Hynix close behind at about 29 percent, so when both companies raise prices in lockstep, the rest of the industry feels it within weeks.
None of this looks like the kind of shortage the tech industry has weathered before, the type caused by a factory fire or a shipping delay that eventually works itself out. This one is being driven almost entirely by demand, and that demand has a name: artificial intelligence.
Where All the Memory Is Actually Going
Every large language model running in a data center somewhere, whether it is answering a chatbot question or generating an image, depends on enormous amounts of high bandwidth memory, or HBM, stacked directly next to specialized AI processors. A single AI server can burn through 10 to 20 times more memory than a conventional server doing ordinary computing work, and by some estimates, AI data centers will consume close to 70 percent of the world’s total memory output in 2026. Back in 2022, that figure was closer to 20 or 30 percent.
To keep up, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have been reallocating wafer capacity away from the ordinary DRAM and NAND that goes into your phone or laptop and toward HBM instead. Roughly a quarter of all DRAM wafer output is now dedicated to HBM, and that share is growing by around 70 percent a year. Micron has put a number on just how costly that trade-off is, noting that every wafer it shifts toward HBM production effectively costs it about three wafers worth of standard DDR5 memory it could have made instead. The math only works because HBM sells at a steep premium. Micron’s HBM and cloud memory revenue alone went from 17 percent of its total DRAM business in 2023 to nearly half by 2025.
The upshot is straightforward, even if it is frustrating for anyone shopping right now: chipmakers are not making less memory overall. They are making a lot more of it, and almost none of the growth is landing anywhere near a consumer product.
Big Tech Is Passing the Bill Straight to You
Nobody has been fully insulated from this, not even the companies with the deepest pockets and the tightest supply chains.
Apple spent most of 2025 absorbing the extra cost, but that ended on June 25, when the company quietly raised prices across nearly its entire hardware lineup with no new specs to justify the jump. The MacBook Air moved from $1,099 to $1,299. The MacBook Pro climbed from $1,699 to $1,999. iPads, the Apple TV, both HomePod models, and even the Vision Pro all got more expensive the same day. Tim Cook, who built his reputation managing Apple’s supply chain through nearly every kind of disruption imaginable, described this one as a “hundred-year flood.”
Microsoft raised Xbox prices by $100 to $150 depending on the model and quietly stopped selling its highest-capacity 2 terabyte configuration altogether. Over in the PC world, Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, and Asus have all confirmed price increases in the 15 to 20 percent range, alongside memory configurations that are quietly shrinking on the low end of their lineups. Our earlier report on how PC makers like Asus and HP were bracing for these price hikes broke this down in detail as it was first unfolding.
IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani summed up where that leaves shoppers pretty bluntly: “The era of bargain-priced PCs and tablets is behind us for now, as rising ASPs and component costs shift the market’s balance of power.” IDC still expects the total value of the global PC market to grow to roughly $274 billion in 2026, even as the number of units shipped keeps falling. People are simply paying more money for fewer machines.
This Is Not a Normal Shortage
Every past memory shortage eventually resolved itself once factories caught up with demand. What makes this one different is that demand itself keeps expanding faster than anyone can build capacity for it. Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are not slowing down their data center spending, and every new AI model that ships needs more memory to train and run than the one before it.
That dynamic reaches far beyond laptops and desktops. Our coverage of how smartphone prices broke records in 2026 found that memory now accounts for more than 30 percent of some phones’ total bill of materials, pushing average selling prices up 21 percent in a single year. And the pressure is not limited to price tags on a shelf. Some smaller hardware makers may not survive it at all. Phison chief executive Pua Khein-Seng, whose company builds controller chips for SSDs, has warned that the squeeze could force companies to cut entire product lines in the second half of 2026, a point our earlier piece on how the RAM crunch could kill products and entire companies laid out in stark terms.
When Does This Actually End?
The honest answer is not soon. Jefferies Equity Research expects memory pricing to climb another 40 to 50 percent in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the current quarter, with a further 30 to 40 percent increase forecast for the fourth quarter. Gartner projects that combined DRAM and SSD prices will surge around 130 percent by the end of 2026 alone, which it estimates will push PC prices up 17 percent and smartphone prices up 13 percent compared with 2025 levels.
New fabrication capacity from Micron and SK Hynix is in the pipeline, but none of it is expected to reach meaningful volume production before 2027 at the earliest, and even then, a large portion of that new supply has reportedly already been pre-sold to AI customers under long-term contracts. Most forecasts now put real relief for everyday buyers somewhere around 2028, when new capacity finally starts outpacing demand growth and prices begin easing back down. Few analysts expect them to fall all the way back to where they sat before this all started.
What You Can Actually Do About It
If you are shopping for new hardware right now, a few practical moves can soften the blow.
Buy more memory than you think you need, today. Configurations only tend to get pricier and, in some cases, more limited, as manufacturers quietly trim their high-capacity options to control costs.
Consider certified refurbished devices for anything that is not mission critical. The used and refurbished market has held up far better on pricing than new hardware, since it draws from devices manufactured before the worst of the price surge hit.
Hold onto what you already own if it is still doing its job. That is a genuinely reasonable strategy right now, not a compromise. Every serious forecast points toward this situation getting worse before it gets better, and there is little upside to rushing into an upgrade in the middle of it.
The AI boom has delivered plenty of headlines about smarter chatbots and faster coding tools. This is the quieter side of that story. The physical hardware powering all of it has to come from somewhere, and right now, that somewhere is the memory chip that used to be sitting inside your phone.
