The DIY market will take the largest hit from the shortages and price increases in the DRAM and SSD market, a leading analyst firm predicts. But there will be no escape for those buying a prebuilt PC in 2026, as analyst firm IDC says they’ve confirmed that major PC makers will raise prices by up to 20 percent.
In a recent press note, analyst firm IDC said that “Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and Asus have warned clients of tougher conditions ahead, confirming 15-20 percent hikes and contract resets as an industry-wide response.”
The apocalyptic rise in DRAM and SSD prices began to be felt a few months ago, with SanDisk, Samsung, and Micron warning of increased prices in both components. Black Friday became the focal point for the DRAM and SSD price increases, with companies like Framework, Minisforum, and Raspberry Pi warning that prices will increase. A memo obtained by TrendForce says that Asus will be the most recent PC maker to follow suit, with price increases from between 10 percent to 30 percent.
Even though the largest vendors have begun quietly telling customers of the price increases, IDC said that the largest vendors will have the most clout to negotiate prices. That, in turn, will leave smaller boutique vendors and DIY companies vulnerable, presumably making them scrabble for whatever remaining components that they can get their hands upon.
Bigger vendors will win
“White box as well as lower tier (often local) vendors, on the other hand, will bear the greatest burden of the shortage, and that would include DIY systems, oftentimes built by gamers,” IDC wrote. “That in turn represents an opportunity for large OEMs to gain share from smaller assemblers in the gaming space by positioning pre-built systems as offering higher value.”
The culprit remains large AI hyperscalers, who are snapping up whatever components that they can to build out data centers for training and inferencing new AI models. The difference between the RAM ending in servers and PCs is relatively slight, meaning that memory makers can and are shifting production to higher-margin server products. SSDs are being pulled in, too. All this means that is that commodity memory makers are reaping the benefits of astronomical demand, and the economics of the market mean that prices rise as a result.
Ironically, that means further pressure on AI PCs. Intel-based AI PCs typically allocate half of the available DRAM to VRAM. AMD’s mobile Ryzen platforms used a fixed amount of VRAM, though a technology called Variable Graphics Memory allows you to fine-tune this manually. VRAM is basically where AI applications currently run on PCs, so maxing out VRAM is seen as the key to improved overall AI performance. Copilot+ PCs, for example, require at least 16GB of DRAM.
The issue, though, is an obvious one: with more DRAM being shipped off to datacenters, the less that AI PC makers have to populate their own systems. “As more small language models and large language models move on device, memory becomes even more important, with many higher-end systems shifting toward 32GB or higher,” IDC wrote. “Just as the industry is seeing a need to add more RAM, it has become prohibitively expensive to do so, even if they can get supply. This will result in higher prices, lower margins, or a potential downmix in the amount of RAM in new systems at the worst possible time for this to occur.”
IDC hasn’t officially changed its forecasts for the PC market, though it said that it’s now offering several “scenarios” for how the market could play out, depending upon the supply constraints. At worst, the PC market could drop 8.9 percent.
IDC also predicted that the prices of phones, especially Android phones, could be affected. Memory can make up as much as 20 percent of the build cost of a cheaper smartphone, IDC noted. Again, larger vendors like Apple will have an advantage, though flagships might not see the continued increases in RAM and storage that customers have come to expect.
“For consumers and enterprises alike, this signals the end of an era of cheap, abundant memory and storage, at least in the medium term,” IDC wrote.
