RAM and SSD prices rose 130 percent. Your next PC costs 17 percent more.

Gartner puts the combined rise in DRAM and SSD prices at 130 percent by the end of 2026 against 2025. That feeds through to roughly 17 percent on the price of a finished PC and 13 percent on a smartphone.

There was no factory fire and nothing is stuck on a ship. The memory went somewhere else.

Where the supply actually went

AI data centres are on course to consume close to 70 percent of global memory chip production in 2026, against 20 to 30 percent in 2022. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron control more than 95 percent of DRAM output between them, and all three have shifted wafer capacity toward High Bandwidth Memory for AI accelerators.

The wafer maths is the whole story. HBM eats roughly three times the wafer area of standard DRAM per gigabyte, so every wafer given to HBM is a wafer denied to PCs, phones and enterprise SSDs. It also earns three to five times the revenue per wafer that conventional DDR5 does, which makes the decision easy for anyone running a fab. Consumer RAM gets whatever is left once cloud providers have locked in their multi quarter contracts.

What the RAM and SSD price increase looks like on an invoice

Memory now accounts for about 23 percent of a PC bill of materials, up from 16 percent in 2025. Enterprise pricing shows the shape of it more bluntly: 32GB DDR5 RDIMMs at 1,000 to 1,400 dollars a module, and 64GB modules above 2,400.

Consumer parts have moved less violently but still moved. RAM alone is up as much as 89 percent across the year. Enterprise SSD pricing has climbed roughly 80 percent on the same squeeze, because NAND fabs are competing for the same capital and the same customers.

Gartner expects shipments to take the hit rather than margins. Worldwide PC shipments are forecast to fall 10.4 percent in 2026 and smartphones 8.4 percent, both against 2025.

So: buy now or wait

Wait is the instinct and it is the wrong one this year. Analysts expect the squeeze to run through 2027 and into 2028, with meaningful new fab capacity arriving late 2027 at the earliest, and there is a lag between a fab coming online and modules getting cheaper on a shelf. We went through the timing question in more detail in when RAM prices will drop and whether to buy RAM now.

If a build is already on your list for the next twelve months, the memory and storage are the parts to buy early rather than last. A 32GB DDR5 kit and a 2TB NVMe drive are both likely to cost more in six months than they do today, and neither goes obsolete sitting in a drawer.

The part worth watching

This is the clearest example yet of AI infrastructure raising the price of ordinary consumer hardware, and it is happening through supply allocation rather than tariffs or shortages anyone can point at. GPUs went through it first, and Nvidia has already been shifting capacity away from gaming silicon for the same reason.

The number to track is not the RAM price. It is the share of memory output going to data centres. When that figure starts falling, everything else follows.

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