Here is something that has not happened in four decades: computers are getting more expensive. Not because of tariffs, not because of supply chain hiccups from a pandemic, but because the largest technology companies on Earth decided they needed every available memory chip for their AI ambitions, and they are willing to pay whatever it takes to get them. The collateral damage of that decision is now arriving at Best Buy, on Dell’s website, and in your next laptop purchase.
DRAM prices have surged 172% since early 2025. Average PC prices are expected to jump 8% in 2026. Dell and Lenovo have announced price hikes of up to 20%. Some vendors are now shipping pre-built desktops without RAM installed, expecting buyers to source their own. IDC projects global PC shipments will drop 11.3% this year. The era of cheap computing hardware, a trend that held steady from roughly 1982 until last year, is over.
What Is Actually Happening
To understand why your next laptop costs more, you need to understand one number: 23%. That is the share of global DRAM wafer capacity now dedicated to producing High Bandwidth Memory, the specialized chips that power AI data centers. In 2023, that number was 8%. The tripling happened because Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and a handful of other hyperscalers placed orders so large and so lucrative that memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron rationally decided to shift production away from the commodity DRAM that goes into your laptop and toward the premium HBM that goes into NVIDIA’s H100 and B200 GPUs.
This is not a temporary blip. This is a structural reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. The factories that make memory chips cannot simply build new production lines overnight. Semiconductor fabrication plants take 3-5 years to construct and cost $15-20 billion each. The capacity that shifted to AI is not coming back to consumer electronics anytime soon.
How It Hits Your Wallet
The math is straightforward. A mid-range laptop that cost $800 in early 2025 now costs $920-$960 for equivalent specs. A desktop PC with 32GB of RAM has seen its memory component cost nearly triple, adding $100-$150 to the final sticker price. Gaming PCs, which require large amounts of fast memory, have been hit hardest, with some configurations up 25-30% year-over-year.
Samsung announced a 60% price increase on memory products in late 2025, and competitors followed. The increases are cascading through the supply chain in waves. First came enterprise servers and data center hardware. Then workstations. Now consumer laptops, tablets, and even smartphones are feeling the squeeze. Apple’s most recent iPhone saw a $50-$100 price increase across models, attributed largely to memory costs.
Computer prices are now rising more than 3% per month, a rate not seen since personal computers first entered the market in the early 1980s, when every generation of hardware was genuinely new technology. The difference now is that the hardware itself is not meaningfully improving for consumers. You are paying more for the same performance because the components are scarcer.
The AI Gold Rush Created This
The root cause is the AI infrastructure buildout, a $645 billion spending spree by Big Tech companies that has consumed resources at a pace the semiconductor industry was never designed to accommodate. Every NVIDIA GPU in a data center requires stacks of HBM chips. Every new AI model training run requires more GPUs. The demand curve is exponential while manufacturing capacity grows linearly.
There is an irony here that borders on absurdity. The same companies building AI tools that promise to make everyone more productive are simultaneously making the computers people need to use those tools more expensive and harder to buy. Microsoft wants you to use Copilot, but the AI infrastructure powering Copilot is part of why your next Surface costs $200 more than the last one.
IDC analyst Ryan Reith put it bluntly: “The era of bargain-priced PCs and tablets is behind us for now.” His team slashed the 2026 PC shipment forecast amid the shortage, projecting that even as fewer units ship, total market revenue will increase to $274 billion purely because each unit costs more. That is not growth. That is inflation wearing a growth costume.
Who Gets Hurt Most
The impact is not distributed evenly. Budget-conscious consumers, students, small businesses, and schools that depend on affordable hardware are being priced out. The $400-$500 laptop category, which represented the bulk of consumer PC sales for years, is shrinking rapidly as manufacturers cannot hit those price points with current component costs.
Developing markets are particularly vulnerable. The affordable computing revolution that brought billions of people online over the past two decades relied on steadily declining hardware costs. That trend has now reversed, and the communities most dependent on cheap technology are the ones least equipped to absorb 20% price increases.
Meanwhile, the hyperscalers causing the shortage are not feeling it at all. When you are spending $100 billion annually on AI infrastructure, you can afford to pay premium prices for memory. The shortage is a problem exclusively for everyone else.
When Does It End?
The honest answer: not soon. Industry analysts do not expect memory prices to return to 2025 levels before 2028 at the earliest. New fabrication capacity is being built, but most of it is dedicated to AI-grade HBM, not consumer DRAM. Samsung and SK Hynix have both signaled that their capital expenditure priorities will continue favoring AI customers because the margins are dramatically higher.
Some relief may come from technological shifts. Next-generation memory architectures and more efficient AI chips could eventually reduce the per-GPU memory requirement, freeing up capacity for consumer products. But those innovations are 2-3 years away from mass production.
In the meantime, the practical advice is unglamorous: if your current computer works, keep it. If you must buy, buy soon rather than later, because prices are still climbing. And understand that the $500 laptop you bought three years ago was a product of an era that has, at least temporarily, ended. The AI revolution is being subsidized by everyone who needs to buy a computer in 2026, whether they asked for AI or not.