this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Technology

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The RAM shortage’s silver lining: Less talk about “AI PCs” (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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RAM prices have soared, which is bad news for people interested in buying, building, or upgrading a computer this year, but it’s likely good news for people exasperated by talk of so-called AI PCs.

As Ars Technica has reported, the growing demands of data centers, fueled by the AI boom, have led to a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips, driving prices to skyrocket.

In an announcement today, Ben Yeh, principal analyst at technology research firm Omdia, said that in 2025, “mainstream PC memory and storage costs rose by 40 percent to 70 percent, resulting in cost increases being passed through to customers.”

Overall, global PC shipments increased in 2025, according to Omdia, (which pegged growth at 9.2 percent compared to 2024), and IDC, (which today reported 9.6 percent growth), but analysts expect PC sales to be more tumultuous in 2026.

“The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile,” Jean Philippe Bouchard, research VP with IDC’s worldwide mobile device trackers, said in a statement.

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[–] MolochHorridus@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Companies want to pull all our computing into their cloud services. It’s an end for personal computers if they manage to make this reality. I suspect the price hikes for components are manufactured to make this happen.

[–] B0rax@feddit.org 3 points 3 months ago

The price hikes are easily explained… companies get massive amounts of money from investors, they spend that money buying GPUs and RAM so they can promise AI. Prices for memory goes up on its own, it is just a „nice“ side effect.