RAM price hikes: the latest on the global memory shortage

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.

Apple’s Mac Mini now starts at $799 after the company pulled the $599 option with 256GB of storage from its online store, as spotted earlier by MacRumors. The model’s discontinuation comes just one day after Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call that a chip shortage will impact its Mac products in the coming months.

“If you look forward to June, the majority of our supply constraints will be on several Mac models,” Cook said. “We think looking forward that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance.” He added that both devices saw “higher-than-expected demand” as well, with many people buying up the device to use with AI agents like OpenClaw.

There may be a long wait before the end of the RAM shortage that’s driving up prices on everything from phones to gaming handhelds. During an earnings call on Thursday, Samsung predicted that the severe memory shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, will not only continue next year, but likely get worse, as reported by Reuters.

As Samsung memory chip business executive Kim Jaejune stated during the earnings call:

The RAM shortage caused by demand from AI datacenters is already driving up prices on phones, PS5s, and Raspberry Pis, but it could be about to get even worse. Samsung is facing employee protests over demands for wages that are more competitive with rival chip manufacturer SK Hynix, including removing Samsung’s cap on bonus pay, allocating more money for bonuses, and raising base salaries. According to AP News, an estimated 40,000 union members attended a rally on Thursday outside Samsung’s Pyeongtaek, South Korea chip manufacturing facility.

If the union and management can’t come to an agreement, the union is planning an 18-day strike beginning on May 21st. As reported by Reuters, output for Samsung’s foundry and memory chips “dropped 58 percent ​and 18 percent, respectively, during the ⁠overnight shift on Thursday as unionized workers attended a protest ​demanding higher wages.”

You can still find the Asus Xbox Ally X and the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus for $999 and $1,049 respectively, but Lenovo’s Legion Go S has seemingly given up the fight. The best version of Lenovo’s 8-inch handheld now costs nearly double what it did at launch — originally $829.99 last summer, the SteamOS version with Z1 Extreme chip now costs a staggering $1,579.99 at Best Buy.

That’s an even bigger price hike than with Lenovo’s flagship Legion Go 2, which saw up to a $650 price hike early this month.

According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60 percent of demand by the end of 2027. SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.

The world’s largest memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are all working to add new fabrication capacity, but almost none of it will be online until at least 2027, if not 2028. SK opened a fab in Cheongju in February, but that is the only increase in production among the three for 2026.

Meta is the next tech company to hike up hardware prices due to the global memory shortage.

Beginning April 19th, Meta’s 128GB Quest 3S VR headset will cost $349.99, the 256GB Quest 3S will cost $449.99, and the Quest 3 will cost $599.99. Those are increases of $50 for both Quest 3S models and $100 for the Quest 3.

Samsung is raising prices across Galaxy Z Flip 7, Galaxy S25 FE, and Galaxy S25 Edge phones, as spotted earlier by Phone Arena. Though the base model of each phone is staying at the same price, devices with higher storage are now up to $80 more expensive:

Last week, Samsung also increased the price of the Galaxy Z Fold 7, bringing its 1TB model from $2,419 to $2,499, while the 512GB version jumped from $2,119 to $2,199. Samsung’s price hikes don’t just end with its phones, however, as Phone Arena spotted increases across its tablet lineup, regardless of storage.

Microsoft just raised the prices across its line of Surface devices amid the global RAM shortage. Now, the 13-inch Surface Pro 11 and the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 cost $500 more than their original starting price, going from $999 to $1,499, as reported earlier by Windows Central.

Last year, Microsoft stopped selling the $999 versions of the Surface Pro 11 and the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 in favor of the $1,199 models with more storage. At the time, it seemed like Microsoft was trying to make room for the cheaper 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop that launched last May. However, these newer devices aren’t safe from the price hikes, either, as the starting price for the 12-inch Surface Pro has gone up from $799 to $1,049, while the 13-inch Surface Laptop is jumping from $899 to $1,199.

I thought the WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD in my gaming PC was pricey when I bought it for $173 in 2024, but now that same SSD costs $649, more than what I paid for most of the parts in my PC combined. The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since November 2025, and consumer SSDs across the board are seeing similar increases, much like with RAM:

According to price trends from PC Part Picker, NVMe SSD prices began ticking upward in December 2025, with prices on 256GB to 4TB SSDs now double or triple what they were just a few months ago, and continuing to climb.

Remember when we thought the Legion Go 2 was expensive at $1,099 and up? Those were the days — Best Buy is now listing Lenovo’s handheld for $1,499 with a Ryzen Z2 or $1,999 with a Z2 Extreme. The latter originally cost $1,349, so that’s a $650 jump in just six months.

And yes, that means Lenovo’s flagship may now cost twice as much as a $999 Microsoft/Asus Xbox Ally X with the same AMD chip, as much as a far more powerful GPD Win 5 with AMD Strix Halo cost last year. But the way things are going, it’s probably only a matter of time till Microsoft hikes its handheld Xbox price too. (For now, Asus rep Anthony Spence tells me there’s “no price increase on the horizon, so far as I can tell,” at least in the US.)

As of today, the price of the 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100, a price bump that’s almost as much as the original $120 price tag. Driven by the ongoing RAM shortage, Raspberry Pi is raising prices on over a dozen of its bare-bones computers, after previous increases in December and February. The increases range from $11.25 to $150.

In a blog post announcing the price increases, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton reiterated that they won’t be permanent, stating, “The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can.”

Sony has announced that as of March 27th, 2026, the company is no longer accepting orders for nearly all the products in its CFexpress and SD memory card lines. The list of affected memory products includes CFexpress Type A, Type B, and SDXC/SDHC cards, although a few models of Type B and low-end SF-UZ series SD cards remain in production, according to PetaPixel, and you may still be able to find them on shelves until the existing supply runs out.

This includes orders from the company’s authorized dealers as well as general consumers for “the foreseeable future,” with the news coming out on the same day Sony said it will raise PS5 prices worldwide.

Sony is raising the price of its PlayStation 5 consoles globally starting April 2nd. In an announcement on Friday, Sony says that the standard PS5 will now cost $649.99, up from $549.99. Meanwhile, the PS5 Digital Edition now costs $599.99 instead of $499.99, and the PlayStation 5 Pro will cost $899.99 instead of $749.99.

Along with these changes, Sony is increasing the price of its PlayStation Portal as well, going from $199.99 to $249.99.

Ayaneo is suspending preorders for its $1,999 Next 2 gaming handheld due to the skyrocketing price of digital storage. In a post on Monday, Ayaneo says the overall cost to build its Windows handheld now nearly doubles the price it originally set, making it “unsustainable” to continue selling.

“Even before the launch of NEXT 2, storage prices had already been rising for several months,” Ayaneo writes. “At that time, we believed the price might be approaching its peak. Even if it meant making little to no profit—or even a slight loss—we still decided to move forward with the launch. However, what we did not expect was that storage prices would not only continue to rise but would increase even more rapidly.”

For the fourth month in a row, Framework is increasing prices on RAM and storage for its modular PCs due to ongoing shortages from suppliers. An update to Framework’s blog on Tuesday states that DDR5 RAM will now cost $13 to $18 per GB, up from February’s rate of $12 to $16 per GB. This is partly due to the company selling out of older, less expensive inventory, which has also pushed Framework to “re-price some capacities” of storage, as well.

Additionally, the Framework Desktop is getting another price increase due to RAM and storage costs. The base configuration of the Desktop now costs $1,269, up from $1,139 in January. Some pre-built configurations of the Framework Laptop 16 are also getting more expensive, and in “upcoming months,” Framework is planning to make similar pricing changes on its other pre-built models.

We’ve been talking to phone companies both big and small this week at MWC, and they’ve basically all agreed on one point: the RAM crisis is hitting hard, and phone prices will almost certainly increase where they haven’t already.

For a major global brand like Xiaomi, volume is one lever the company can pull. To balance out the increased costs, Angus Ng, Xiaomi’s director of communications and public relations, tells us, “We can potentially go for bigger volumes, especially in the mid-range segment and entry-level segment, so then we can try to lower costs in that area.“ Pulling other levers, like scaling back flagship specs, isn’t considered an option. Says Ng, “…we have to chase the latest and intend to showcase our best.” The Xiaomi 17 and 17 Ultra launching this week in Europe match last year’s pricing, but it sounds like that trend might not hold in the long term.

The smartphone industry could experience a record-breaking decline in 2026 as a result of the RAM shortage stemming from memory-hungry AI giants. That’s according to the latest report from the International Data Corporation (IDC), which forecasts smartphone shipments to plummet 12.9 percent this year, marking its “lowest annual shipment volume in more than a decade.”

At the same time, the average selling price for smartphones is set to hit new highs, with IDC predicting a 14 percent increase to a record $523. “While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level,” IDC senior researcher Nabila Popal says, adding that the sub-$100 phone segment will become “permanently uneconomical.” Next week, Apple is rumored to announce a new edition of its budget smartphone as the “iPhone 17e,” which could give a hint about where things are going.

Maybe you’ve heard: Memory is expensive now. The price of RAM has tripled, quadrupled, even sextupled depending on the type of chip, all because AI companies are gobbling it up.

But maybe you’ve thought: I don’t buy memory sticks! I don’t build my own PCs! It won’t affect me, right?