Memory suppliers just blew a hole in the PC gaming industry – and they’re about to do the same to everything else. For weeks, PC enthusiasts have borne the brunt of skyrocketing memory prices, but the shockwaves will soon impact a wider range of products as suppliers pour resources into a far bigger and more lucrative endeavor: AI.
The biggest names in the AI industry are buying up DRAM memory for their sprawling data centers, and memory makers are prioritizing their demands over everyone else’s. DRAM is embedded “in every part of our digital society today,” Jeff Janukowicz, research VP at IDC, tells The Verge. That’s everything from laptops to smartphones, gaming consoles, smart TVs, cars, and even small amounts in solid-state drives (SSDs). “There’s a lot at stake,” he says.
The smartphone upgrade you’ve been eyeing might cost even more next year: the 12GB of memory in a flagship Samsung Galaxy smartphone now reportedly costs the company nearly $40 more. IDC is already predicting fewer smartphone sales in 2026 due to the RAM shortage, and a $9 increase in average phone prices. Some brands, like China’s Xiaomi, are already warning customers of future price hikes. Laptop manufacturers may cut corners, and price increases might be coming to gaming consoles.
“If you are not a server customer, you will be considered a second priority.”
Today, just three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — control 93 percent of the entire global DRAM market. Specifically, data from Counterpoint Research shows SK Hynix holding a 38 percent market share in the second quarter of 2025, followed by Samsung at 32 percent and Micron at 23 percent. No other company has more than a 5 percent share.
And the three big RAM companies seem to be in no great hurry to reverse sky-high prices; all three boasted about record revenue in their most recent earnings reports, while their net profits exploded. They don’t seem troubled that data centers are eating up RAM that’d normally appear in consumer products, either.
For Samsung, memory is bigger than most consumer products anyhow. Samsung’s memory business raked in a record 26.7 trillion Korean won (~$18.12 billion) in its most recent earnings report, making up more than a quarter of its total revenue. That’s nearly double what its entire appliance and TV business made during that time.
So far, Micron, which raked in a record-breaking $11.32 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, made the most dramatic change in response to DRAM demand. It announced that it’s winding down its longstanding consumer-facing brand, Crucial, so it can focus on supplying AI companies with the memory they need to power their servers. “If you are not a server customer, you will be considered a second priority for memory vendors,” Gartner analyst Shrish Pant tells The Verge.
Meanwhile, Samsung and SK Hynix, the other two big DRAM companies, may have already committed 40 percent of the world’s entire memory output to a single AI project, according to Tom’s Hardware, when it struck a deal with OpenAI to supply up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month as part of the AI giant’s Stargate infrastructure initiative.
With the AI memory boom in full swing, the big DRAM makers seem to be riding the wave to profit, too. SK Hynix’s net profits more than doubled from 5.75 trillion Korean won ($3.92 billion) in Q3 2024 to 12.6 trillion Korean won (~$8.6 billion) in Q3 2025. Micron saw a 10x increase in its annual net income, going from $778 million in fiscal 2024 to $8.6 billion for fiscal year 2025.
To make DRAM — whether for AI companies or for consumer products — memory suppliers need silicon wafers: thin, disc-shaped materials used as the base of semiconductors, including memory chips. Part of today’s problem is that AI data centers require far more of these wafers than consumer products. Data centers gobble up DRAM to power the servers behind the world’s most advanced AI models, and they also use another kind called high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which comes packaged with high-end GPUs like Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chip.
Demand for these HBM-equipped AI chips isn’t slowing down. Nvidia reported selling more AI chips than ever during its most recent earnings report, with some even selling out completely.
With memory suppliers earmarking production lines and silicon wafers for HBM and AI, it’s leaving “less wafer output for standard PC and consumer DRAM,” according to David Naranjo, the associate director at Counterpoint. HBM also uses up far more resources, as a report from NAND Research states that “wafer capacity consumed by HBM exceeds that of standard DRAM by a factor of three.”
Though PC builders may be the first to experience these price hikes as the memory stick values skyrocket, the increase “could affect a broad range of industries,” Naranjo says. Lenovo is stockpiling memory as part of an attempt to “strike a balance between price and availability” for customers next year, according to Bloomberg, and Dell and HP are planning to make adjustments, too. During an earnings call last month, Dell CEO Jeff Clarke said the company is “going to do everything we can to minimize the impact, but the fact is, the cost basis is going up across all products.” Meanwhile, HP’s Enrique Lores said it will try to mitigate the shortage by raising prices or cutting the amount of memory it puts inside its devices.
Companies may cut other corners, too. “You may use a cheaper battery, maybe a smaller capacity battery,” Janukowicz suggests. “Display might be another area where you might look to do some cost reductions.”
Even with those potential solutions, companies might “pass along some of those price increases to consumers” anyway, says Janukowicz. That’s especially true for more affordable devices like Chromebooks and the Google Pixel 9A, since there’s less room to swap out parts that have already been cost-optimized — and that could make it harder to find budget-friendly options, period.
For some companies, price increases are already becoming a reality. Custom PC builders CyberPowerPC and Maingear have said they will have to raise prices due to the surging cost of RAM, and so will modular laptop company Framework. Even Raspberry Pi, which makes single-board computers, has been forced to increase the price of its newer devices, while gaming handheld maker OneXPlayer announced plans to raise the price of its latest device before halting sales completely.
Concerns are growing around the price of the highly anticipated Steam Machine, too, as Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais has said it will be “in line with the current PC market.” Leaker Moore’s Law is Dead suggests Microsoft will price hike the Xbox Series X yet again due to the shortage; it already costs $150 more than it did at launch five years ago.
PC builders looking to upgrade are seeing memory prices double, triple, even quadruple. For example, G. Skill’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 RAM (2x16GB) went from $124.99 in September to $389.99, according to data from PCPartPicker. The similarly specced Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM (2x16GB) cost $134.99 in September before spiking to $427.99 in December.
SSDs, which primarily use NAND flash memory rather than DRAM, are facing similar challenges as AI companies buy up storage for their data centers as well. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron also make these devices, and just like with DRAM, they’re shifting focus to AI customers. “It’s really a combined problem,” says Janukowicz.
Even with rising demand for DRAM, the big three are hesitant to ramp up production. They may be taking a more careful stance after oversupply took a chunk out of their revenue in 2023 — but they’re also holding back because it’s profitable.
A Samsung representative told investors that the company plans to “pursue a strategy of maintaining long-term profitability” instead of addressing the shortage by “rapidly expanding facilities,” as reported by PCGamer. SK Hynix just celebrated “its highest-ever quarterly performance, driven by the full-scale rise in prices of DRAM and NAND,” and pointed out that operating profit in particular “exceeded 10 trillion won for the first time in the company’s history.”
Korean outlet Seoul Economic Daily says SK Hynix does plan to spend $500 billion to build new production plants, with its first expected in 2027. Micron is also planning to build a plant in New York, though we now know that it won’t focus on making consumer-focused products. When asked whether SK Hynix plans to discontinue the production of consumer products, spokesperson Paul Jang tells The Verge that the company “is not considering to discontinue the related business.” Samsung didn’t respond to a request for comment.
With memory makers holding off on greater expansion, Janukowicz says prices could stay the same or continue to increase throughout 2026, while SK Hynix told investors last week that it expects the shortage to continue through late 2027.
Either way, it’s bad timing for PC gaming enthusiasts, who just got over the hump of GPU price hikes — and it’s bad news for everyone else, too, as RAM becomes yet another reason for companies to raise prices.
