ARM, Qualcomm and Samsung have confirmed that prices for PCs and mobile devices will increase in 2026 as data centres corner the world’s RAM market.
At CES in Las Vegas, ARM, chief executive Rene Haas said the squeeze on memory chips was the most severe he had seen in at least two decades. Samsung, co-CEO TM Roh, called the shortage “unprecedented” and said it would have an “inevitable” impact on consumers.
Over the past year, Google, Amazon, Meta and OpenAI have talked up billions in data centre spending, betting AI will reshape industries and hoovering up component supply in the process.
Those facilities are hungry for high-bandwidth memory, and suppliers have followed the margin. With Samsung, SK Hynix and US group Micron dominating memory, production is being steered towards advanced HBM instead of the stuff that keeps laptops and phones affordable.
Samsung said its fourth-quarter operating profit tripled, largely thanks to HBM sales. Micron said it was winding down its Crucial consumer brand in December, citing surging demand for AI data centres.
Qualcomm’s chief financial officer, Akash Palkhiwala, said the memory crunch was “pretty dramatic, [and] what’s driving the shortfall is the data centre deployments by five or six companies in the world with an incredible amount of capex”. Morgan Stanley analysts reckon the jump in memory costs from the final quarter of last year means hardware makers will raise prices “significantly” in the first half of this year.
That price bump is likely to mean weaker sales for Android phones and Windows PCs. Beancounters at IDC said in December that the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple and Samsung are better placed to keep mobile prices down, partly thanks to long-term supply deals that lock in components up to two years ahead.
IDC warned the smartphone market could shrink by as much as 5.2 per cent in 2026 if the shortage drags on, with lower-end Chinese phone makers taking the worst of it. The Consumer Technology Association said consumer confidence in late 2025 hit its lowest level since July 2022, so this is landing on shoppers already feeling skint.
