Memory Shortage Fuels Tech Price Increases as AI Demand Consumes 70% of Global Production

MacBooks Are the Latest Victim of the Memory Shortage. Here's Why Laptop Prices Keep Rising

Gone shopping for a new laptop recently? It's not your imagination; prices are up. Memory and storage prices have exploded since the second half of 2025, and we're nearly a year into this mess. Everything with memory in it or on it, from complete PCs to components such as graphics cards, has spiked in cost, inflating PC prices. (Apple is the latest company to announce significant price increases to its lineup of laptops, desktops, and iPads.) Strap in, because top-level memory makers like SK Hynix see this crisis lasting through 2030. That's a long time to weather these skyrocketing prices. (Hey, it's even inspired some particularly resourceful engineers to make their own RAM.) No device that relies on memory modules to function is safe. As one of PCMag's lead hardware writers, I've been tracking the issue and digging into how we got here. I've been testing PCs and keeping up with their pricing for more than 15 years now, and I'm confident in predicting that the next year or more will be tough for buying a new laptop. The same models that you know are still available and receiving the usual revisions, but almost all of them are pricier than last year. Here's why. Why Is RAM So Expensive Right Now? Let's first understand why RAM prices have surged so much and why they will continue to rise. The simple answer is overwhelming demand from the AI-compute giants. Massive banks of memory are critical to peak AI performance, making memory chips essential to meeting the soaring need for AI power. The data centers that power ChatGPT and other AI tools are gobbling up a massive chunk of the available memory-manufacturing bandwidth. AI applications don't necessarily demand the exact same kinds of memory that PCs do, but the relevant memory factories, or fabs -- these days, largely concentrated among three big players, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix -- have only so much capacity. This year, AI-centric memory is projected to consume 70% of global memory hardware production, according to TrendForce, a Taiwan-based industry analysis and consulting company focused on the semiconductor industry. That leaves only so much capacity for consumer stuff. To meet that AI data-center hunger, major memory-chip makers are shifting some of their manufacturing capacity to stacked-design high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and server-grade DDR5, further cutting the supply of chips destined for consumers and consumer-grade machines. How big a shift is this? For example, American memory giant Micron has exited the direct-to-consumer memory market entirely, shutting down its longtime Crucial sub-brand familiar to many upgraders and home PC builders. It will still provide memory to commercial PC makers, but the crunch affects them, too. A starved supply, with no drop in demand, means prices have gone through the roof -- and they're expected to stay high for a year or more, as AI software giants such as OpenAI and AI-hardware titans such as Nvidia try to lock in supply pricing, contracting huge numbers of yet-to-be-made wafers and chips. It's Not Just the RAM: Graphics Cards, SSDs Are Under Pressure, Too The trouble is that these rising prices won't stay limited to just DDR5 RAM modules. (DDR memory is also referred to as DRAM.) We're already seeing upticks in DDR4 and DDR3, older memory standards that may not deliver the speed needed for current AI tech but do just fine for more pedestrian uses. Plus, this supply shortage is affecting other components that contain memory as part of the whole. The immediate ripple effect will hit graphics cards, which rely on dedicated memory for assisting with graphics rendering and local AI workflows. (And memory crunch aside, graphics cards themselves are also seeing huge increases in demand.) The prices of GDDR6 and GDDR7 video memory used by those cards are rising for the same reasons: The cost per gigabit has more than tripled in the last six months, and this price surge will translate directly into more expensive desktop and laptop graphics cards. As PC users feel the squeeze on memory, they're likely to turn to fast solid-state drives (SSDs) and software solutions to offset constrained RAM. But the companies making DRAM overlap with those making the NAND chips used for the SSDs that laptops and desktops rely on. And if DRAM demand is pulling manufacturing capacity away from consumer DRAM chips, it will also pull capacity away from the chips that make up SSDs. The price of NAND wafers has already climbed in lockstep with memory, jumping as much as 60% month-over-month last November, according to supply-chain analysis firm Procurement Pro. Naturally, as the price of those components rises, so does the total cost of a new laptop. Major laptop brands such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo have already publicly estimated price hikes of 15% to 30%, and smaller companies like Framework have taken steps not only to raise RAM prices but also to prioritize the sale of complete systems over standalone parts to deter scalpers from scarfing up freestanding components just for resale. Maybe you're not seeing the signs of this quite yet. To some extent, current prices have been stabilized by existing inventory. A company like Apple was able to fend off price increases for a while because the chips it had on hand were purchased at lower prices. But with those stockpiles drying up, the competition for what remains on the market will get heated...and more and more expensive. The takeaway? Prices aren't just peaking, they're going to be higher for a while. And with companies buying up manufacturing capacity in advance, it could be years before things stabilize. Laptop Pricing Forecast: Expect Some Big Price Increases These price increases will be across the board: Every laptop category, from Chromebooks to gaming laptops, will get more expensive as memory remains bottlenecked by price and availability. And it's going to strike those categories in different ways. High-end laptops for gaming and media creation are already luxury items, but prices for 32GB and 64GB systems will soar further. High-memory configurations (in any category) are going to get a lot more expensive. Meanwhile, ultraportable laptops (both business and consumer models) may shift entirely to soldered memory chips -- aside from Lenovo's ThinkPad T-series and Framework's modular offerings, socketed DDR5 RAM was already hard to find in these kinds of laptops. I suspect that a protracted supply issue will snuff out most of those that are still around. (That said, mobile workstations will likely keep using memory modules; their prices are traditionally high to start with, and they're considered more investment-grade machines.) I'd expect 16GB to emerge as the new ceiling for moderately priced laptops, and 32GB models will become even more premium. Budget systems and Chromebooks may not see prices rise as high, since most already offer just 4GB or 8GB of memory to begin with. But when prices are low to start, a $500 laptop quickly becomes a $650 laptop when you factor in a 30% price increase. I'd expect the selection of machines in the under-$500 category to shrink over the next year, and, perhaps, for 4GB to re-emerge as a more common memory amount in the very cheapest machines. Google's Chromebook Plus guidelines, for one thing, mandate at least 8GB of memory, so most of those models may no longer start at the $399 base price we've seen from some of these machines in recent years. Apple's 2026 MacBook Neo seemed to buck this trend, debuting at just $599 as a budget option during this crisis. That's a scenario Apple pulled off using stashes of processors culled from the manufacturing of its smartphone chips, and by leveraging its deeply refined manufacturing process. But even this budget laptop may have been too good to be true; Apple raised the cost of its base-model Neo by $100 on June 25, 2026. How to Buy a Laptop in the RAM-pocalypse This new pricing paradigm means a few things for laptop shoppers. The first bit of advice is similar to what I suggested back when tech tariffs were the price threat of the moment: If you know you need to buy something relatively soon, buy it now, before prices climb higher. Laptop prices will become more volatile over the next year or two, and they'll go only one way: up. Second, plan for today and tomorrow, whether that means paying more up front for extra RAM you might need, or looking for a system that lets you upgrade the RAM. With so many systems today using soldered-down memory, you're usually stuck with whatever you select at purchase. So either bite the bullet and pay for the RAM you need at checkout, or buy a system that will let you upgrade once this demand wave has passed. Finally, if you really need to save this year, don't look forward, look back. A 2025 or even 2024 laptop model might be a year behind in processor or graphics technology, but you might be able to save a bunch by buying, say, an Apple M4 MacBook or an early Intel Core Ultra model that was priced before the RAM crunch. However, move fast, because speculators may start snapping up older or used systems for the chips, or to flip the whole system later for a profit.

Lenovo warns that higher RAM prices are the "new normal" and we might never see them go back down

This year has been plagued by price hikes and skyrocketing RAM prices. Unfortunately, it may be the "new normal" according to Lenovo. At a recent conference, Lenovo said that DRAM and NAND prices will "never" return to pre-2025 levels. And this is despite companies like Micron and SK Hynix building new fabs and adding capacities to try to meet the supply gap. The "never" was apparently presented as a joke, per the German site ComputerBase. The company's presenter then went on to say that higher prices would be the "new normal" in 2030 and beyond. It's not a comforting statement from a company that has been quite open about the RAM crisis spiking prices and changing their computing strategy. Memory and storage prices have come down a bit since a peak in April, but they're still hundreds of dollars more expensive than they were a year ago. And we can see the impact on gaming with Xbox raising prices again and Apple issuing broad price increases this week. Shifting blame AI is to blame for the ongoing memory crisis. Datacenters that power large language models and other AI tools are demanding and have bought up most of the capacity of the big three memory manufacturers: Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix. Micron's chief business officer didn't blame its biggest customer for the memory shortage this week and instead obliquely hinted that Apple is behind it to the Wall Street Journal. In his remarks, CBO Sumit Sadana didn't name the Cupertino giant but suggested that tough supplier negotiations meant the company couldn't invest in more fabs or capacities. "We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive. A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins," Sadana told the WSJ. Micron is a memory supplier for Apple, providing DRAM and NAND chips that are used in iPhones, Macs and iPads. Apple has been known to push for long-term purchasing contracts, where other companies might only get short-term six-month to one-year deals. Sadana's comments surfaced just as Apple announced its price increases. Apple's outgoing CEO warned about price hikes in an interview with the Wall Street Journal a week ago, calling the shortage a "hundred-year flood." He pointedly blamed the demand for high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers that shrinks the memory supply for consumer devices like the MacBook Neo. For now, you're screwed because some guy on LinkedIn wants to generate a picture of a cat dressed as Napoleon taking over Disneyland and call it "good business." Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Alternatively, you can read our content on the Tom's Guide app available now for iOS and Android. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. Finally, you can visit our dedicated Tom's Guide Savings Squad hub for expert help on getting the best products for less.

Buying a new phone or laptop in 2026? Here's why it'll cost more

Surging RAM and storage prices are having a nasty knock-on effect Are you looking to upgrade your smartphone or trade up to a new laptop soon? This may not be the best time to do it. 2026 is already a turbulent year for tech, but price rises are coming thick and fast. Games consoles, TVs, smart home kit and even new cars are set to leave more of a dent in your wallet than they otherwise would. The memory modules used by pretty much every consumer gadget are in short supply, which has pushed up wholesale prices on the remaining production capacity. Manufacturers are now going to pass those higher prices onto you. Apple is the latest to adjust prices across pretty much its entire lineup, with some Mac computers leaping by a massive $1300. Here's what's causing the cost increases and which gadgets stand to be most affected. I've also got a few tips on how to avoid overpaying for your tech this year. Why is tech more expensive in 2026? It's all AI's fault, essentially. The tech industry's obsession with artificial intelligence has created a gold rush, with investors sending stock prices stratospheric. Nvidia is now the world's most valuable company, being valued at a ludicrous $4.7 trillion; it makes over ten times more from AI hardware than it does from consumer graphics cards. That unprecedented investment has let AI-related businesses build bigger and more powerful data centres. All those servers need memory - lots and lots of it. Firms with the funds have been able to hoover up the world's supply of DRAM and NAND modules (the memory chips used for memory and flash storage) leaving the consumer tech world to fight over the scraps. In the past few months alone, the price of RAM modules has reportedly increased by several hundred percent. The increased demand for - and higher margins of - enterprise-grade hardware has in turn made memory manufacturers like Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix shift their production away from consumer chips. Samsung's semiconductor division reportedly refused a RAM order from its own Electronics subsidiary for the new Galaxy phone range, while Micron folded its Crucial brand entirely, ending a 30 year run of PC gaming RAM and SSDs. What sort of gadgets will cost more? Pretty much all of them. Smartphones and laptops felt the pinch immediately, as memory and storage make up a considerable portion of their bill of materials (BOM): as much as 20% in a mid-range mobile, or 15% in a flagship, according to industry analysts IDC. In June Nothing announced it wouldn't make a successor to the CMF Phone 2 Pro as component prices made it impossible to build a new phone that was meaningfully better than the old one while sticking to the same wallet-friendly price. The biggest brands like Apple and Samsung likely have long-term deals with memory makers guaranteeing supply through 2026, so it could be 2027 before consumers really feel the pinch. It does mean the Galaxy S26 and iPhone 18 models are unlikely to see RAM or storage size increases from the current generation, though, in order to stretch that supply as far as possible. PC hardware, games consoles and gaming handhelds all rely heavily on memory modules. Some consumer DDR5 memory kits now cost three to four times their pre-AI bubble RRPs. Desktop graphics cards carry equally eye-watering price tags. Smaller brands and DIY computer builders are some of the hardest hit, but even industry heavyweights have felt the pinch. Sony raised the price of every PlayStation 5 variant in March, while Nintendo at least gave gamers a heads up that the Switch 2 would cost more from September 2026. Rumours suggest the next-gen PlayStation and Xbox consoles could be delayed from an expected 2027-2028 launch window while the firms wait for prices to stabilise. Valve had to confirm its more expensive Steam Deck OLED wasn't an all-new model and its PC-based Steam Machine hardware landed at a much higher price than originally planned. Even Apple felt enough of a pinch to hike prices almost universally in June, with iPads, MacBooks, HomePods and the Vision Pro headset all seeing increases. You should also expect TVs to feel the impact. There could even be a double-whammy where new models cost more and the outgoing sets don't see any significant price reductions. When will technology prices stabilise? There's no end in sight currently. While memory manufacturers are racing to build new production facilities that can meet demand, they won't be fully up and running for at least another year. It's predicted to take a further six months before their output will meaningfully affect supply. That could mean multiple years of higher prices, unless the AI bubble bursts. There's no sign of that happening any time soon. How to avoid paying extra for tech in 2026 The obvious answer is to avoid upgrading your gadgets until memory prices and availability stabilise. If you can eke another year of use from the smartphone currently in your pocket, things might have improved by the time you come to replace it. If that's not an option - maybe your battery has bitten the dust or your screen is so cracked now you can barely make out your incoming messages - consider buying a 2025 handset instead. There are some proper bargains to be had if you shop around. With no new graphics card generation yet, PC gamers might want to dial the graphics settings down on their games rather than replace their GPUs. The latest processors from Intel and AMD also only offer slightly faster performance than the outgoing chips (outside of AI performance, which you might not even care about), so there's not as much to gain from buying new components as there has been in previous years. Shopping second-hand could also be an option. Let someone else swallow the increased costs on new components, and buy their old kit for a more reasonable price.