You may have heard: Memory is expensive now. The price of RAM has tripled, quadrupled, even tripled depending on the type of chip, all because AI companies are gobbling it up.
But you might have thought: I don’t buy pexe! I’m not building my own PC! It won’t affect me, will it?
I’m here to tell you that the RAM for your wallet will come anyway.
Got a phone in your pocket that you’d like to upgrade in the coming years? Fancy a game console or handheld? Maybe on a laptop? Will you need a new router, whether you buy it outright or rent it from your ISP? Each of these devices is expected to experience shortages, price increases, or both in 2026. And even if you don’t plan to buy, you’re dependent on goods and services from others who will pay more to upgrade their devices.
“RAMageddon” just keeps getting worse, with no immediate end in sight. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and almost everything now has a computer: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box. RAM is a device’s short-term memory, and AI needs a lot to handle all the data it processes. And most of that RAM comes from just three companies that happily prioritize the AI gold rush over everything else.
We may never know how many products have actually been delayed or canceled because of RAM — like how Nvidia might miss a gaming GPU release for the first time in 30 years, or how Meta won’t release a single VR headset this year and plans to charge a premium when it returns in 2027, or how Sony’s next PlayStation might make it to 2029 because of RAM.
But we know RAMageddon is coming next for your phone.
Analysts from IDC, Omdia and Counterpoint agree: 2026 was one of the best years for smartphone sales as shipments rose about 2 percent to about 1.25 trillion phones in a single year. Apple announced record sales of iPhones in January.
Everyone also agrees that the lack of RAM is about to turn it on its head. Prices will go up. Fewer products will be available. Or as Omdia research manager Le Xuan Chiew put it, “retailers will shift to prioritize profitability while expanding alternative revenue streams.”
Flagship smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm is warning that companies will make fewer phones, period — and that the remaining phones will be more expensive. CEO Cristiano Amon says the big drop in his smartphone business will be “100 percent” due to memory shortages.
Here are a few select Amon quotes from the company’s February 4 earnings call:
- “Unfortunately, I think the entire sector is affected by memory.
- “Industry-wide memory shortages and price increases are likely to determine the overall scope of the mobile phone industry during the fiscal year.”
- “OEMs are very likely to favor the premium and higher tiers as they have done in the past.”
- “We just wish there was more memory.
- CFO Akash Palkhiwala also said, “We have seen several OEMs, particularly in China, take steps to reduce their phone build plans and channel inventory.”
How much more can you pay? It’s hard to say, but IDC points out that memory accounts for 15-20 percent of the material cost of a mid-range phone and about 10-15 percent of a high-end flagship phone. When we first started reporting that RAM was killing everything, IDC thought average phone prices could rise by just $9. He now predicts that the average price may increase by as much as 8 percentwith “significantly higher” price increases for cheaper phones, where “OEMs will have to pass the cost on to end users”.
That means if you’re used to buying $500 phones, they can easily cost $600 or more. Even if you’re used to $1,000 phones, you might be getting less bang for your buck: “New flagship models in 2026 likely won’t get any RAM upgrades, sticking with 12GB for Pro models instead of going up to 16GB,” writes IDC. We’re already seeing the same thing: Google just announced the Pixel 10A without the new chips and the same average 8GB of RAM inside.
Even Apple, which can usually bully suppliers on prices, is feeling pressure on its supply chain now that AI companies are writing huge checks for memory stocks The Wall Street Journal. This could force it to raise the price of its iPhones to maintain the company’s profits. Apple analyst Tim Cook said this quarter that he would “look at a number of options to deal” with how the shortage affects the company’s gross margins.
“Industrial resources” he said 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 money back on exclusive software – ended before the RAM crisis began. Trump’s tariffs broke the dam and now we half expect the next Xbox to be a $1000 PC rather than a traditional console.
Bloomberg states that RAMaggedon is also coming for the Nintendo Switch 2 in the form of a price increase and the Sony PS6 in the form of a delay “until 2028 or even 2029”.
Our last, best hope for a subsidy model was Valve, a great money-grubber company that launched the original Steam Deck at an unbeatable price of $399 via a “painful” subsidy. If Valve did the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could legitimately compete with the PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.
But Valve nearly dashed those hopes with a series of moves. In late December, it ended its run on the Steam Deck for $399, bringing the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that Steam Machine was delayed due to a lack of memory and that the company would have to change its pricing expectations. And now even the $549 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock, specifically due to the memory crunch.
Other handhelds are also more expensive: although the Lenovo Legion Go 2 will get SteamOS this year, the memory reduction means it will cost more or pack less than the Windows version when it first arrived, with less power, storage and RAM at $1,199. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, which I thought was expensive at $999, is now $1,099, $1,149, or even $1,199 depending on where you look.
PCs generally need even more RAM than phones and consoles, and were hit faster because PC manufacturers didn’t feel the need to stockpile RAM beforehand. They also generally need larger SSDs, prices of which have risen by 90 percent in a single quarter.
That’s why nearly every major laptop maker — Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, Acer — is reportedly planning price hikes of 10, 20, or even 30 percent, and why Chosun Biz announces that Lenovo, HP, Dell, Samsung and LG are reevaluating their 2026 PC product plans.
IDC suggests that the entire PC market could decline by 4.9 to 8.9 percent in 2026, while TrendForce predicts a 2.4 percent decline in notebooks, where it previously expected growth.
Dell has reportedly already started raising the prices of its laptops by $55 to $765, depending on which components you choose. And modular laptop company Framework writes that its own costs have risen from about $10 per gigabyte to as high as $16 per gigabyte, so it’s selling its new laptops and motherboards for 6 to 16 percent more than before.
“We are raising prices again only enough to cover the increase in costs from our suppliers,” writes Framework CEO Nirav Patel.
Even though Lenovo has admitted it’s stockpiling RAM to keep it from running out, the world’s biggest PC maker is still paying more to secure its supply for 2026; CEO Yang Yuanqing said Bloomberg its memory costs increased by 40 to 50 percent last quarter, and suggested prices may soon double.
While Apple hasn’t telegraphed plans to raise MacBook prices due to RAM increases, it’s quite possible we’ll see for ourselves in just two weeks at its March 4th event.
“There is no relief until 2028,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in early February after speaking with two of the big three memory companies. One of them, Micron, publicly said the same, saying Wccftech that its memory factory in Idaho won’t open until mid-2027 — and that “you won’t really see actual production” until 2028. SK Hynix also previously predicted that the shortage would last until the end of 2027.
While Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, which control about 95 percent of global DRAM supply, are making enough money to ramp up memory production, building their promised new factories will take time. And they also find it more profitable and less risky to build 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 that if you overbuild the most, you end up going bankrupt.” Samsung is expected to increase its memory wafer supply by just 5 percent this year.
In the meantime, RAM manufacturers will profit as much as they can, with the additional cost ultimately being passed on to you.