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The ongoing RAM shortage—which is driving up prices on PC components from DRAM to SSDs—hasn’t yet reached its peak. Already, companies are debating how long the price surge will last. The thing is, just because cost inflation may eventually recede, consumers will inevitably be screwed by higher prices for PCs, laptops, consoles, and practically every other computing device long after the AI bubble bursts.
Over the weekend, Edward Crisler—the PR lead for major AMD AIB (add-in board) supplier Sapphire—went on the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel to calm consumers’ nerves about the ongoing PC parts price surge. Crisler says the “black hole” of AI “sucking everything into it” will hurt gamers for six months, but after that “the market will start to stabilize.”
Nobody can debate the facts: AI data centers are paying such a high premium for memory that the major producers—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—are all refocusing their businesses for the sake of AI. That has led to a major deficit in DRAM (dynamic random access memory) as well as NAND flash storage and skyrocketing prices. The prices are already starting to impact other forms of storage, like HDDs (hard disk drives) and SSDs (solid state drives).
Now the question is when consumers can expect to pay an acceptable price for RAM. One leaker on X, BullsLab (via Wccftech), screenshotted a reported internal analysis that suggested consumer DRAM would be “constrained” through 2028.
SK Hynix internal analysis
▪ SupplyExcluding HBM and SOCAMM, supply bit growth for commodity DRAM is projected to be constrained through 2028.
▪ Production & InventoryWhile supplier inventories are being depleted to minimum levels, production Capacity is expected to see… pic.twitter.com/ITa21oKSrR
— BullsLab Jay (@BullsLab) December 10, 2025
Beyond PCs, the RAM crunch will impact every computing device. Laptop brands like Framework have suggested they will have to raise prices, but the company promised to keep prices contained. Business Insider reported last week that Dell plans to raise prices on its devices starting Wednesday, Dec. 17. Meanwhile, multiple analyst firms, including IDC and Counterpoint Research, have shown that smartphone prices will likely go up in 2026 by 10, 25, or 25% depending on the amount of memory inside. Counterpoint also said memory prices could rise another 40% through the second quarter of 2026.
So whether or not we see prices “stabilize” over time, computing will still be more expensive on the whole. Crisler isn’t talking explicitly about prices coming back down to where they were before the memory crunch. RAM prices already fluctuate with the market, even before the boom in AI data centers. The Sapphire PR lead also mentions that the last big issue with PC pricing is tariffs. “It wasn’t the tariff wars that were creating the mess; it was the uncertainty—the prices were changing almost every single day,” he said.
If prices ever go down, that’s not deflation but merely “disinflation,” aka a drop in the inflation rate. It doesn’t impact the new normal. In 2025, we watched laptops and handheld gaming PCs slowly mark up over the course of the year, primarily incentivized by tariffs. For instance, Lenovo announced its Legion Go S with SteamOS would start at a promised $550. That became $600 on release. The price tag finally ended at $650 a few months after launch, $100 more than when it started. The cost of hardware isn’t coming down over time like it used to. Devices like the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which came out in 2024, now cost more in 2025 than they did at release.
Even the pandemic-era GPU shortage wasn’t this bad. A combination of constrained supply chains, a boom in demand from crypto miners, and a horrific scalper situation made GPUs shoot through the roof back in 2020 and 2021. Prices eventually calmed down to near MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) more than two years after launch. Costs are not coming down nearly as fast in today’s inflated economy. Today’s sales are equivalent to the pre-tariff prices. Even when prices “normalize,” they won’t ever truly be the normal we had just a year before now.
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Source: Gizmodo