RAM price hikes: the latest on the global memory shortage

Last year, Microsoft’s 13-inch Surface Laptop quickly became one of my favorite thin-and-light Windows notebooks. At $900, it was easy to recommend to anyone wanting MacBook Air–like build quality and battery life on Windows — I even convinced my sister to buy one on sale.

But that was last year. This year, thanks to RAMageddon, that same laptop costs $950, and now that price gets you half as much RAM — just 8GB. It’s the same great hardware on the outside, but it’s not the same laptop on the inside.

As the AI boom boosts demand for RAM, SK Hynix — one of the world’s biggest suppliers of memory chips — launched on Wall Street Friday. The South Korean chipmaker opened at $170 per share and raised $26.5 billion, surpassing Alibaba’s record as the largest debut of a foreign company, according to reports from The Associated Press and CNN.

After reaching a $1 trillion valuation in May, SK Hynix briefly overtook Samsung as South Korea’s most valuable company. SK Hynix is one of three major companies benefitting from a surge in demand for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). These components have become essential for the widespread buildout of AI data centers, as tech giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google use DRAM for the servers to power their AI models, while HBM comes packaged inside high-end AI chips like Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra.

Apple is looking to alleviate some of the pressure on its supply chain by seeking an exception from the Trump administration to buy RAM chips from CXMT, a company blacklisted by the Pentagon over ties to the People’s Liberation Army, according to the Financial Times. The skyrocketing prices of RAM and storage have driven Apple to raise prices on almost all of its products this week, so it makes sense that it would seek alternative sources.

Legally, Apple isn’t barred from buying chips from CXMT, but doing business with a company tied to the Chinese military would carry serious reputational risks. It’s possible that CXMT could still find itself the target of export controls for undermining US security. The company was on a list of proposed additions to the so-called “Entity List” by the Commerce Department, but held off because the White House was in the middle of trade negotiations with China.

Tim Cook recently said price increases were “unavoidable” and described the company’s pricing as “unsustainable.” The 16-inch MacBook Pro saw its price go up by $300. The 11-inch iPad Air went from $599 to $749. Even the HomePod Mini got a $30 bump to $129. Cook squarely placed the blame at the feet of the AI industry, which is not surprising. RAMageddon has already come for your desktop PCs and gaming consoles. The Xbox has seen its price climb nearly 25 percent depending on the model, and Nothing even canceled an entire phone launch. Apple is just the most recent to jack up prices and point the finger at AI.

The price hikes are “basic economics,” says Tim Derdenger, associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. As the tech industry has raced to win the AI war, “the price of RAM has skyrocketed because the memory manufacturers have reallocated their production lines to produce new HBM memory for AI data centers and away from consumer DDR5.” And when the cost of components goes up, companies tend to pass those costs on to consumers.

Arduino’s Raspberry Pi-like microcomputer the Uno Q is joining many other devices in getting a price hike this week. The 2GB version of the Uno Q, which is powered by a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor, will increase in price from $44 to $59, while the 4GB model is getting a slightly steeper increase from $59 to $79. If you’ve been eyeing the Uno Q as a cheaper alternative to Raspberry Pi’s current lineup, you have a little over a week to grab either version at the current price as the increases won’t take effect until July 6th.

In a letter shared through the official Arduino blog, the company’s chief product officer Marcello Majonchi says Arduino’s “memory component costs have more than doubled” over the last six months alone, “fueled by the enduring demand for AI applications.” The company has so far been able to hold off on raising prices “thanks to support from Qualcomm” which purchased Arduino last October, but “with no near-term signs of relief in memory supply or pricing, continuing to absorb these costs is no longer possible.”

It’s not exactly surprising that RAMaggeddon is making new tech hardware really expensive. But if you’ve been in the market for things like a new computer or tablet, this week has been filled with sticker shock. Given how many companies announced price hikes related to component shortages, it seems unlikely things will get cheaper any time soon.

Valve started the week off by finally revealing the price of the Steam Machine, its long-delayed, console-like PC that, in our tests, has performance on par with the PS5. It starts at $1,049, nearly double the price of the six-year-old PS5, and that’s for the base configuration with 512GB of storage and without a controller. A bundled controller adds an extra $79, and if you want the 2TB model, you’ll have to tack on another $300. (If you still wanted one soon at that price, well, I hope you entered the lottery.)

Microsoft is increasing the prices of Xbox consoles again. Starting August 1st, 512GB models will be $100 more expensive, while 1TB models will be $150 more expensive. This means that the Xbox Series S will start at $499.99, the Xbox Series X without a disc drive will start at $749.99, and the Series X with a disc drive will start at $799.99. Microsoft also says it will be “sunsetting” its 2TB Xbox Series X.

Microsoft last raised prices in October by $20 to $70 and says it had hoped to avoid further hikes. “Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027,” Microsoft says in a blog post. “The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.”

Following an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this month where Tim Cook hinted at upcoming price changes, Apple officially raised the prices on many of its hardware offerings today. They include iPads, Macs, smart speakers, and even the affordable MacBook Neo. While Cook said the company has tried to “shield” customers from price increases as the cost of memory and storage has recently surged thanks to AI companies stockpiling RAM and SSDs for data centers, Apple has finally joined companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft with price hikes.

Here’s a breakdown of what Apple hardware has been affected today and the range of price increases based on entry-level and maximum configurations.

The Galaxy A27 has been announced, and at $349.99 it’s $50 more than last year’s A26. That’s understandable in the current economic climate, but a harder sell given that Samsung has also downgraded a few key specs.

Compared to last year’s phone, the A27 has lower resolution 12-megapixel selfie and 5-megapixel ultrawide cameras, worse IP64 waterproofing, and is very slightly thicker at 7.8mm. Other specs are simply unchanged, like the 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, 5,000mAh battery, 6.7-inch 120Hz display, and 50-megapixel rear camera. There’s only one real upgrade to the phone, but it is a welcome one: a move from the Exynos 1380 to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chipset.

Apple is hiking the prices of its MacBooks, iPads, and other devices by hundreds of dollars in response to the ongoing memory and storage shortages. The new MacBook Neo will now start at $699 instead of $599, while the M3 Ultra Mac Studio is getting a $1,300 increase to $5,299, up from $3,999. The price hikes were reported earlier by Bloomberg and MacRumors.

Here’s a list of the increases impacting the starting prices of Apple’s other devices:

Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.

The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.

Nothing’s next budget phone is the latest victim of RAMageddon. As 9to5Google reports, Nothing cofounder Akis Evangelidis announced in a post on X that a follow-up to the CMF Phone 2 Pro won’t be coming this year:

Last week, Nothing CEO and cofounder Carl Pei also said the RAM shortage has impacted the cost of the company’s midrange phone, stating, “For Phone 4A, memory costs doubled between when we decided to build the device and when it launched. They’ve doubled again since.” According to Pei, “memory is now the most expensive component in a smartphone.” Nothing is far from the only company facing RAM pricing challenges — earlier this week, Tim Cook announced Apple will be raising prices, saying “the situation has become unsustainable.”

Apple is planning to raise prices in response to the ongoing memory shortage. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook says “price increases are unavoidable:”

Cook doesn’t say when Apple plans on raising prices or which products will be affected. The company has already stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM in March and later raised the starting price of the Mac Mini to $799 after dropping the cheaper $599 option from its lineup. Analyst Tim Culpan also suggested that Apple could discontinue the base configuration of the MacBook Neo, while keeping the $699 model with 512GB of storage.

SanDisk has announced an expensive way to boost the PlayStation 5’s storage capacity. The company’s new Optimus GX PRO 850P NVMe SSD is an officially licensed PS5 accessory in capacities ranging from 1TB to 8TB. The largest option can store up to 200 PS5 games (based on average installation sizes) SanDisk claims, but thanks to the global memory shortage, it will cost you $2,959.99 when it’s eventually available through the company’s online store, discounted from $3,699.99.

Even after you take into account Sony’s recent console price hikes, you can buy three PS5 Pro consoles for the price of just one of these 8TB sticks. But the smaller capacities are similarly expensive. The 4TB version is $1,499.99 (discounted from $1,874.99), while the 2TB option is $759.99 (down from $949.99) — still $100 more expensive than the standard PS5.

If you’re thinking about upgrading your phone, “the best time was yesterday,” according to Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei, echoing a message we heard during MWC. As Android Authority reports, Pei said in a post on X that the RAM shortage has already impacted Nothing’s less expensive mid-range phone: “For Phone 4A , memory costs doubled between when we decided to build the device and when it launched. They’ve doubled again since.” He warned that “Phone prices are going up, and they’ll keep going up into next year.”

Pei says RAM can now account for over 50 percent of the cost of a new phone. Nothing’s just the latest phone maker to warn of looming price hikes — Samsung and Google are both expected to raise prices on their phones as a result of higher memory costs.

The RAMageddon crisis has got Microsoft rethinking its Xbox console hardware business. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox strategy chief Matthew Ball have both revealed this week that Microsoft is reevaluating plans for its next-generation Project Helix console and exploring “radically different” console business models in the meantime.

“We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping, and we are very cognizant of the ways in which we need to change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it’s flexible,” said Ball in an interview with The Game Business earlier this week.