The AI boom has a cost most people never see on a cloud bill: it is buying up the world’s memory chips. In 2026 that showed up in the price of ordinary laptops and phones.
The surge
On February 2, 2026, market researcher TrendForce published its forecast for the first quarter. The rises were the largest it had ever projected:
| Product | Forecast Q1 2026 contract price change |
|---|---|
| Conventional DRAM | +90% to 95% |
| PC DRAM | more than +100% |
| Server DRAM | about +90% |
| Mobile DRAM (LPDDR4X, LPDDR5X) | about +90% |
| NAND flash | +55% to 60% |
| Enterprise SSDs | +53% to 58% |
TrendForce had already raised its DRAM forecast from 55% to 60%, and warned further revisions were possible.
Why it happened
Two forces pushed in the same direction:
- Cloud providers bought ahead. Hyperscalers and server makers locked in supply with long-term agreements to feed AI data centres.
- Capacity moved to AI memory. Manufacturers shifted production toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM that sits next to AI accelerators, and moved some NAND lines over to DRAM. Every wafer that becomes HBM is one that doesn’t become laptop memory.
New capacity can’t fix it quickly. Synopsys chief executive Sassine Ghazi told CNBC in January that the crunch would last through 2026 and 2027, because building new fabs takes at least two years. Lenovo’s CFO said low-end devices would see price rises first.
Who won, who lost
The memory makers had a record year. Samsung reported third-quarter operating profit of ₩107.44 trillion on revenue of ₩195.25 trillion, up about 127% year on year, with almost all the profit from its chip business and its HBM4 ramp. Its shares still fell, because the result missed even higher expectations.
Device makers paid. Intel cited soaring memory and component costs as part of a $1 billion to $2 billion shortfall in its fourth-quarter outlook, CNBC reported, and TrendForce noted some manufacturers were cutting specifications, shipping less memory or CPUs with fewer cores.
Is it peaking?
On November 11 TrendForce said the increases were slowing for PCs. It forecast PC DRAM contract prices rising 13% to 18% in the fourth quarter, after notebook shipments fell 15.8% from the previous quarter. Manufacturers’ inventories are building, and suppliers are tentatively planning to cut PC DRAM output in 2027. Server memory, the part driven by AI, is a different story.
Why it matters for developers
- Budget more for hardware. Developer laptops with 32 GB or 64 GB of RAM, and servers you run yourself, cost noticeably more this year.
- Watch the specs. Some machines quietly ship with less memory at the same price point.
- Self-hosting is pricier. Running models locally or on your own servers depends heavily on memory, so the economics of self-hosting moved against small teams in 2026.
TrendForce figures are analyst forecasts, not transaction prices.
Sources
- TrendForce: Q1 2026 memory price forecast (Feb 2, 2026)
- CNBC: Memory chip shortage, Synopsys and Lenovo on AI data centres (Jan 26, 2026)
- CNBC: Samsung Electronics third-quarter earnings (Oct 29, 2026)
- TrendForce: Q4 2026 PC DRAM forecast (Nov 11, 2026)
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