A.I. demand is driving up memory prices and could raise PC costs

A.I. companies are buying up memory chips, causing prices for components used in laptops and smartphones to soar, the New York Times reported on Jan. 29, 2026. The crunch has affected businesses such as Falcon Northwest, a custom PC builder in Medford, Ore., and is pushing up prices for some high-end machines.

Kelt Reeves, who has sold high-end personal computers for 34 years, said the cost of memory chips has tripled since late summer, forcing Falcon Northwest to raise the price of some popular systems to more than $7,000 from about $5,800. "This isn’t a consumer-driven bubble," Mr. Reeves, 55, said.

Chip makers are finding they can earn more selling high-end memory to A.I. data centers than to PC and smartphone companies, and shipments of consumer-grade chips have slowed while prices have surged. TechInsights predicts higher memory costs would raise the price of a typical PC by $119, or 23 percent, by this fall compared with the same period last year; that figure includes increases for RAM and NAND flash memory.

"The memory market is bananas," said Mike Howard, an analyst at TechInsights. The market is now dominated by Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, after years of boom-and-bust cycles, though some Chinese RAM makers have recently entered.

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