Maybe you’ve heard: Memory is expensive now. The price of RAM has tripled, quadrupled, even sextupled depending on the type of chip, all because AI companies are gobbling it up.
But maybe you’ve thought: I don’t buy memory sticks! I don’t build my own PCs! It won’t affect me, right?
I’m here to tell you RAM is coming for your wallet anyhow.
Do you have a phone in your pocket you’d like to upgrade in the next few years? Fancy a game console or handheld? A laptop, perhaps? Will you need a new router, whether you’re purchasing outright or renting from your ISP? Each of these devices is expected to have shortages, price hikes, or both in 2026. And even if you don’t plan to buy, you depend on goods and services from others who’ll be paying more to upgrade their devices.
“RAMageddon” is only getting worse, and there’s no immediate end in sight. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and almost everything has a computer in it now: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box. RAM is the short-term memory of a device, and AI especially needs lots to juggle all the data it’s processing. And most of that RAM comes from just three companies that are happily prioritizing the AI gold rush over everything else.
We may never know how many products were truly delayed or canceled due to RAM — like how Nvidia may skip releasing a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, or how Meta may not release a single VR headset this year and plans to charge a premium when they return in 2027, or how Sony’s next PlayStation may get pushed to 2029 because of RAM.
But we do know that RAMageddon is coming for your phone next.
Analysts from IDC, Omdia, and Counterpoint agree: 2026 was one of the best years ever for smartphone sales, growing shipments roughly 2 percent to roughly 1.25 billion phones in a single year. Apple reported record iPhone sales in January.
They also all agree that the RAM shortage is about to flip that on its head. Prices will go up. Fewer products will be available. Or as Omdia research manager Le Xuan Chiew put it, “vendors will shift toward prioritizing profitability while expanding alternative revenue streams.”
Flagship smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm is warning that companies will build fewer phones, period — and that remaining phones will be more expensive. CEO Cristiano Amon says a big dip in its smartphone business will be “100 percent” because of the memory shortage.
Here are some choice quotes from Amon on the company’s February 4th earnings call:
- “Unfortunately, I think that the whole sector is impacted by memory.”
- “Industry-wide memory shortage and price increases are likely to define the overall scale of the handset industry through the fiscal year.”
- “OEMs are very likely to prioritize premium and high-tier, how they have done in the past.”
- “We just wish there was more memory.”
- CFO Akash Palkhiwala also said: “We’ve seen several OEMs, especially in China, take actions to reduce their handset build plans and channel inventory.”
How much more might you pay? Hard to say, but IDC points out that memory represents 15–20 percent of the materials cost of a midrange phone, and about 10–15 percent of a high-end flagship phone. When we first started reporting on RAM ruining everything, IDC thought average phone prices might go up by just $9. Now, it’s predicting the average price might increase as much as 8 percent, with “significantly higher” price hikes on cheaper phones where “OEMs will have to pass the cost to end users.”
That means if you’re used to buying $500 phones, they might easily cost $600 or more. Even if you’re used to $1,000 phones, you may get less bang for the buck: “new flagship models in 2026 will likely have no RAM upgrades, sticking to 12GB for Pro models rather than increasing to 16GB,” IDC writes. We’re already seeing similar: Google just announced a Pixel 10A with no new chips and the same mediocre 8GB of RAM inside.
Even Apple, which can typically bully suppliers on pricing, is feeling pressure on its supply chain now that AI companies are writing huge checks for memory supplies, reports The Wall Street Journal. That could force it to increase the price of its iPhones to maintain the company’s profits. Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts this quarter that he “will look at a range of options to deal with” the way that the shortage is impacting the company’s gross margins.
“Industry sources” told ZDNet Korea that Apple may pay 80 percent or even 100 percent more for memory this quarter after renegotiating with Samsung and SK Hynix — and may pay even more in the second half of the year.
The era of “razor and blade” game console subsidies — where companies sell consoles at a loss and make their money back on exclusive software — was over before the RAM crunch even began. Trump’s tariffs broke the dam, and now we’re half-expecting the next Xbox to be a $1,000 PC rather than a traditional console.
Bloomberg reports that RAMaggedon is also coming for the Nintendo Switch 2 in the form of a price hike, and Sony’s PS6 in the form of a delay “to 2028 or even 2029.”
Our last, best hope for the subsidy model was Valve, a company that famously rakes in money hand over fist and launched the original Steam Deck at the unbeatable price of $399 through a “painful” amount of subsidy. If Valve did the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could have legitimately competed with the PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.
But Valve has all but dashed those hopes through a series of moves. In late December, it discontinued the $399 Steam Deck, raising the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that the Steam Machine had been delayed due to the memory shortage and that the company would have to reset expectations on pricing. And now, even the $549 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock specifically because of the memory crisis.
Other handhelds are getting pricier too: although the Lenovo Legion Go 2 will get SteamOS this year, memory shrinkflation means it will cost more or contain less than the Windows version did when it first arrived, with less horsepower, storage, and RAM at the $1,199 mark. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, which I thought was pricey at $999, now costs $1,099, $1,149, or even $1,199 depending on where you look.
PCs generally need even more RAM than phones and consoles, and they’ve been hit quicker because PC makers haven’t felt the need to stockpile RAM in advance. They also generally need larger SSDs whose prices have surged 90 percent in a single quarter.
That’s why almost every major laptop manufacturer — Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, Acer — is reportedly planning price hikes of 10, 20, or even 30 percent, and why Chosun Biz is reporting that Lenovo, HP, Dell, Samsung, and LG are rethinking their PC product roadmaps for 2026.
IDC suggests the whole PC market could decline by 4.9 to 8.9 percent in 2026, while TrendForce is forecasting a 2.4 percent decline in laptops where it previously expected growth.
Dell reportedly already began hiking prices of its laptops by $55 to $765, depending on which components you choose. And modular laptop company Framework writes that its own cost has risen from roughly $10 per gigabyte to as much as $16 per gigabyte, and so it’s selling its new laptops and mainboards for 6 percent to 16 percent more than previously.
“We are again only increasing pricing enough to cover the increases in cost from our suppliers,” Framework CEO Nirav Patel writes.
Even though Lenovo has admitted to hoarding RAM so it won’t run out, the world’s largest PC manufacturer is still paying more to secure its supply for 2026; CEO Yang Yuanqing told Bloomberg his memory costs increased by 40 to 50 percent last quarter and suggested prices might double soon.
While Apple hasn’t telegraphed plans to raise MacBook prices due to RAM price hikes, it’s quite possible we’ll see for ourselves in just two weeks at its March 4th event.
“There’s no relief until 2028,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in early February, after speaking to two of the big three memory companies. One of them, Micron, has publicly said the same, telling Wccftech that its Idaho memory fab won’t open until mid-2027 — and that “you’re not really gonna see real output” until 2028. SK Hynix also previously predicted the shortage would last through late 2027.
While Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, which control about 95 percent of the global DRAM supply, are making enough money to increase memory production, it will take time to build their promised new fabs. And they also see it as more profitable and less risky to build out slowly instead of rushing to meet demand.
As SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel told us in December, it wasn’t that long ago that some of these memory companies were losing money due to overproduction: “The scary thing about this industry is if you overbuild the most, you end up going bankrupt.” Samsung is expected to increase memory wafer supply by just 5 percent this year.
In the meantime, the RAM makers are going to profit as much as they can, with the added costs ultimately being passed on to you.
