You may have heard: memory is expensive Now. The reason the price of RAM has tripled, quadrupled, even varied depending on the type of chip, is because AI companies are gobbling it up.
But you may have wondered: I don’t buy memory sticks! I don’t build my own PC! It won’t affect me, right?
I’m here to tell you that RAM is coming for your wallet, somehow.
Is there a phone in your pocket that you’d like to upgrade in the next few years? Do you want a game console or handheld? A laptop, perhaps? Will you need a new router, whether you’re buying outright or renting from your ISP? With shortages of each of these devices, prices are expected to rise. or both In 2026. And even if you don’t plan to buy, you are dependent on the goods and services of others who will pay more to upgrade their equipment.
“Ramageddon” is only getting worse, and there is no immediate end in sight. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and now almost everything has a computer: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box. RAM is a device’s short-term memory, and AI especially needs a lot of it to handle all the data it needs to process. And most of that RAM comes from just three companies that are happily prioritizing the AI gold rush over everything else.
We’ll probably never know how many products were actually delayed or canceled because of RAM — like how Nvidia might skip releasing a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, or how Meta might not release a single VR headset this year and plan to charge a premium when it returns in 2027, or how Sony’s next PlayStation might get pushed to 2029 because of RAM.
But we know Ramageddon is coming to your phones.
Analysts at IDC, Omdia and Counterpoint agree: 2026 was one of the best years ever for smartphone sales, with shipments increasing by about 2 percent to about 1.25 percent. Arab Phone in the same year. Apple reported record iPhone sales in January.
They all also agree that the lack of RAM is going to take a toll on it. Prices will increase. Less products will be available. Or as Omdia research manager Le Xuan Chiew put it, “Vendors will move toward prioritizing profitability while expanding alternative revenue streams.”
Flagship smartphone chip maker Qualcomm is warning that companies will make fewer phones – and the remaining phones will be more expensive. CEO Cristiano Amon says the memory shortage will cause a major decline of “100 percent” in its smartphone business.
Here are some of Amon’s favorite quotes from the company’s February 4 earnings call:
- “Unfortunately, I think the whole field is affected by memory.”
- “Industry-wide memory shortages and price increases are likely to define the overall scale of the handset industry during the financial year.”
- “OEMs are very likely to prioritize premium and high-end, as they have done in the past.”
- “We just wish there was more memory.”
- CFO Akash Palkhivala also said: “We have seen many OEMs, particularly in China, take action to reduce their handset manufacturing plans and channel inventory.”
How much more can you pay? Hard to say, but IDC says memory represents 15-20 percent of the material cost of a midrange phone and about 10-15 percent of a high-end flagship phone. When we first started reporting that RAM ruined everything, IDC thought average phone prices might just rise by $9. Now, it is being estimated that the average price may rise to 8 percentageWith “significant” price increases on cheaper phones where “OEMs will have to pass the cost on to end users.”
This means that if you’re used to buying $500 phones, they could easily cost $600 or more. Even if you’re used to $1,000 phones, you could still get less bang for your buck: “New flagship models in 2026 will likely see no RAM upgrades, being limited to 12GB instead of increasing to 16GB for the Pro models,” IDC writes. We’re already seeing the same: Google recently announced the Pixel 10A with no new chips and the same average 8GB of RAM inside.
According to the report, even Apple, which can usually bully suppliers on pricing, is now feeling pressure on its supply chain as AI companies are heavily scrutinized for memory supplies. wall street journal. This may force the company to increase the price of its iPhones to maintain profits. Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts this quarter that he would “consider a number of options” to deal with the way the shortage is impacting the company’s gross margins.
“Industry sources” told ZDNet Korea Apple could pay 80 percent or 100 percent more for memory this quarter — and even more in the second half of the year — after renegotiating deals with Samsung and SK Hynix.
The era of “Razer 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 shortage began. Trump’s tariffs broke the dam, and now we’re half-expecting the next Xbox to be a $1,000 PC instead of a traditional console.
bloomberg RAMaggedon is coming in the form of a price increase for the Nintendo Switch 2 and a delay “to 2028 or even 2029” for Sony’s PS6, the report says.
Our last, best hope for a subsidy model was Valve, a company that famously makes money hand over fist and launched the original Steam Deck at the unbeatable price of $399 through a “painful” amount of subsidy. If Valve had done the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could legitimately compete with PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.
But Valve has dashed those hopes through a series of moves. In late December, it discontinued the $399 Steam Deck, bringing the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that the Steam Machine had been delayed due to a memory shortage and that the company would have to reset expectations on pricing. And now, the $549 Steam Deck OLED is also out of stock specifically due to the memory crunch.
Other handhelds are also getting pricier: Although the Lenovo Legion Go 2 will get SteamOS this year, memory shrinkflation means it’ll cost more or less than the Windows version did when it first came out, clocking in at the $1,199 mark with less horsepower, storage, and RAM. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, which I thought cost $999, now costs $1,099, $1,149, or even $1,199, depending on where you look.
PCs generally require more RAM than phones and consoles, and they have been increasingly impacted because PC manufacturers have not felt the need to store as much RAM as before. They also typically require larger SSDs whose prices have increased by 90 percent in a single quarter.
That’s why almost every major laptop maker – Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, Acer – is reportedly planning to hike prices by 10, 20 or 30 percent, and why. Chosun Biz Lenovo, HP, Dell, Samsung and LG are reportedly rethinking their PC product roadmaps for 2026.
IDC suggests the entire PC market could decline 4.9 to 8.9 percent in 2026, while TrendForce is projecting a 2.4 percent decline in laptops, where it had 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 increased from about $10 per gigabyte to $16 per gigabyte, and so it is selling its new laptops and mainboards for 6 percent to 16 percent more than before.
“We are again increasing pricing only enough to cover the increase in costs from our suppliers,” writes Framework CEO Nirav Patel.
Even though Lenovo has admitted to hoarding RAM so it won’t run out, the world’s largest PC maker is still paying more to secure its supply for 2026; CEO Yang Yuanqing told bloomberg Their memory costs increased by 40 to 50 percent last quarter, suggesting prices could soon double.
Although Apple hasn’t telegraphed plans to raise MacBook prices in response to rising RAM prices, it’s quite possible we’ll see for ourselves at its March 4 event in just two weeks.
“There is no relief until 2028,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in early February after talking to two of the Big Three memory companies. One of them, Micron, has said the same thing publicly, has told wccftech Its Idaho memory fab won’t open until mid-2027 — and “you won’t really see actual output” until 2028. SK Hynix also previously predicted the shortage would last until the end of 2027.
While Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, which control about 95 percent of the global DRAM supply, are making enough money to ramp up memory production, it will take time to build their promised new fabs. And they find it more profitable and less risky to build slowly rather than rushing to meet demand.
As Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, told us in December, it wasn’t long ago that some of these memory companies were losing money due to overproduction: “The scary thing about this industry is that if you overproduce, you eventually go bankrupt.” Samsung is expected to grow memory wafer supply by only 5 percent this year.
Meanwhile, RAM manufacturers will make as much profit as they can, with the additional costs ultimately being passed on to you.
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