The short version
Since late 2025, the manufacturers who make the world’s memory chips — Samsung, SK hynix and Micron — have been steering their production lines toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI accelerators consume, because it pays far better than the ordinary DRAM that goes into laptops and phones. Everything downstream of that decision has become more expensive, and the effects are now unmistakable on Australian shelves.
Four numbers frame the whole story:
- 35 per cent. HP told investors on its Q1 FY2026 earnings call in February that memory had grown to about 35 per cent of the bill of materials for a PC, up from 15 to 18 per cent a quarter earlier. Its CFO said memory costs had roughly doubled sequentially.
- 130 per cent. Gartner’s February forecast put the combined DRAM and SSD price rise at about 130 per cent through the end of 2026 against 2025 levels, feeding through to roughly 17 per cent on PC prices and 13 per cent on smartphone prices.
- Still climbing. TrendForce’s July outlook has conventional DRAM contract prices rising another 13 to 18 per cent and NAND flash another 10 to 15 per cent in the current quarter — a slowdown from the roughly 60 per cent jumps of Q2, but still up.
- Not before late 2027. New fab capacity from all three makers is not expected to move the needle until late 2027 or 2028, and both Samsung and SK hynix have signalled they are in no hurry to build their way into an oversupply.
The practical consequence for a buyer is unusual and worth stating plainly: for most of computing history, waiting made hardware cheaper. For the next 18 months or so, on current forecasts, waiting is more likely to make it dearer — and the machine you eventually buy is likely to come with less memory than the equivalent model does today.
How big the rise actually is
Component pricing is normally invisible to consumers, so it is worth laying the published figures side by side. These are the numbers analysts and vendors have put on the record, not our measurements.
| Memory share of a PC’s build cost | Roughly 15 to 18 per cent, rising to about 35 per cent in one quarter (HP, February 2026). Gartner projects memory reaching about 23 per cent of total PC component costs as the entry tier is squeezed out. |
|---|---|
| DRAM and SSD prices, 2025 to end 2026 | Up about 130 per cent combined (Gartner, February 2026). |
| Q2 2026 spot movement | LPDDR5X, the memory used in thin laptops and phones, up about 89 per cent; DDR4 up as much as 51 per cent. |
| Q3 2026 contract forecast | Conventional DRAM up 13 to 18 per cent quarter on quarter; NAND flash up 10 to 15 per cent (TrendForce, 3 July 2026). Some module makers were negotiating far steeper rises. |
| Flow-through to finished devices | PC prices up about 17 per cent and smartphone prices about 13 per cent by end 2026 (Gartner); average PC prices up to 8 per cent (IDC). Major vendors including Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and ASUS have flagged 15 to 20 per cent rises. |
| Shipments | Gartner expects worldwide PC shipments down 10.4 per cent and smartphone shipments down 8.4 per cent in 2026 — the steepest contraction in over a decade. |
| Relief | Not before late 2027 on most forecasts; 2028 on the more pessimistic ones. Micron’s new Japanese DRAM plant is not expected to ship until the second half of 2028. |
The gap between Gartner’s 17 per cent and IDC’s 8 per cent is not a contradiction so much as a difference in what is being measured — average selling prices across a whole market shift when the cheap end of the market simply stops being made. Which brings us to the part of this story that gets far less coverage than the price tags.
The part nobody puts on the sticker: specs are shrinking
A price rise is visible. A specification cut is not, and it is the more consequential response.
TrendForce warned in December 2025 that once vendors burned through inventory built at older component costs, mid-range laptops would slide back from 16GB to 8GB of RAM, and high-end machines would settle at 16GB rather than climbing. That was a forecast for “spring 2026” in northern-hemisphere terms. It has since been widely reported as arriving: manufacturers are shipping 8GB base configurations again, and Microsoft has both introduced 8GB base Surface models this year and removed 32GB recommendations from its own guidance pages. Some vendors have gone further and sold pre-built desktops with no RAM installed at all.
Reasoning beyond the sources: this is the rational move for a vendor facing a component it cannot get cheaply, and it is the one that costs a buyer the most over the life of the machine. A laptop that is 15 per cent dearer is an annoyance you feel once. A laptop with half the memory is a machine that starts swapping to disk two years earlier than it should, and in 2026 that machine is very likely to have its RAM soldered to the board, so the shortfall is permanent. The price rise is temporary. The configuration you buy is not.
We would treat 8GB as disqualifying for any Windows machine you intend to keep for more than a year or two, on the same reasoning the industry itself applied when it moved past that number years ago. Nothing about the workload got smaller; only the supply of chips did.
What it looks like in Australia
Australian buyers see this through two channels: retail component prices, and the business channel that resells finished systems. Both have moved hard.
On the retail side, a price-tracking snapshot of mainstream Australian retailers in January 2026 recorded the cheapest in-stock 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5-6000 kits moving from around $499 in December 2025 to about $689 a month later — a 38 per cent rise inside four weeks, with listings at Centrecom, PCCG and Scorptec clustered in the $649 to $719 range.
The channel numbers are starker still. In its deep dive on the shortage, CRN Australia quoted Jason Puschmann, founder and managing director of Brisbane reseller Computer Alliance, describing what happened to his own catalogue: “A 4TB Samsung SSD used to cost close to $500 and now it retails for $1149. If you need to purchase RAM, a 16GB component was priced at $60, now they’re selling for $200 to $300.” Puschmann was blunt about the cause: “To some extent, it’s a supply issue and the memory people are being very bloody greedy.”
Supply timing has moved with the prices. Tech Data ANZ country manager Robbie Upcroft told the same publication that “what used to be one-to-two-week turnarounds are now being one to two months”. Hubify chief executive Victor Tsaccounis said quotes for jobs had nearly doubled over six months, and Champions of Change chief executive Xara Tran described quote turnarounds stretching from days to one or two weeks.
The detail with the sharpest edge for anyone buying business hardware: Computer Alliance’s corporate general manager Lee Gurd described pricing validity windows collapsing to seven to fourteen days, with the firm financing early purchases and warehousing stock until customers need it. If you are used to a quote sitting valid for a month while a purchase order works its way through, that assumption no longer holds.
Why it happened, in one paragraph
High-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators carries margins several times those of the commodity DRAM in a laptop. Faced with a finite number of wafers, the three makers who control the market shifted capacity toward the higher-margin product, and Samsung and SK hynix — together around 70 per cent of DRAM — have been explicit about not wanting to expand so aggressively that they create the next glut. Meanwhile demand for conventional memory did not fall: AI inference infrastructure needs ordinary server DRAM and enormous quantities of flash storage too, so the data centre is competing with the consumer at both ends. The end of Windows 10 support and US tariff pressure added to the squeeze on PC pricing at the same moment. None of the fixes are fast, because a memory fab takes years.
When does it end
The forecasts disagree about the month and agree about the shape. IDC has pointed to stabilisation around mid-2027; Counterpoint Research has named Q4 2027 as the earliest inflection point; Intel’s chief executive has said there will be no relief until 2028; and some analysts think the tightness runs past 2028. New capacity from Micron and SK hynix is not expected in volume production before 2027 at the earliest, and Micron’s Japanese DRAM facility is not slated to ship until the second half of 2028.
There is one genuine sign of a ceiling. TrendForce’s July note is explicit that consumer buyers have hit an affordability wall: “Record-high contract prices mean customers from consumer markets, such as PCs and smartphones, are reaching their affordability limit, leading to more moderate price increases in 3Q26.” That is the market’s own brake — demand destruction, visible in Gartner’s double-digit shipment declines. It slows the rate of increase. On every published forecast we could find, it does not reverse it this year.
How to buy through it
The advice that follows is our reading of the sourced picture above, applied to an Australian buyer. It is not a prediction that prices will behave any particular way — nobody in this market has been right about the timing so far.
| Buy the memory at purchase, not later | Most thin-and-light laptops now solder their RAM, and LPDDR5X is exactly the part that rose about 89 per cent last quarter. If a machine cannot be upgraded, the configuration you choose on the order page is the configuration you own for its whole life. Paying the current premium once beats living with 8GB for four years. |
|---|---|
| Treat 8GB as a red flag, not a budget option | Vendors are reintroducing 8GB base models specifically to hold a price point. That is a cost decision made in their interest, not a judgement that 8GB is enough. Check the actual configuration rather than trusting a model name you recognise from last year. |
| Prefer upgradeable if you want to defer | A machine with SODIMM slots and a spare M.2 bay lets you buy modestly now and add capacity if prices ease in 2027. That flexibility is worth paying for in a rising market in a way it usually is not. Desktops keep this advantage over laptops decisively. |
| Storage counts too | NAND is rising alongside DRAM, and SSD capacity tiers are where vendors quietly claw back margin. A 4TB drive that was near $500 in the channel and is now $1149 tells you what a “storage upgrade” line item is really worth. External drives and network storage are cheaper places to keep archives than the premium tier of a laptop configurator. |
| Business buyers: assume the quote expires | Validity windows of seven to fourteen days are being reported in the Australian channel, and lead times of one to two months. Build both into project timelines, get quotes re-confirmed before approval, and expect allocation rather than availability. |
| Repair and upgrade still beat replacing | A RAM upgrade that used to cost $60 and now costs $200 to $300 is a much worse deal than it was, and still a far better deal than a new machine at 2026 prices. The same logic applies to a battery or an SSD swap in a laptop that is otherwise fine. |
| Off-lease and refurbished are unusually competitive | Second-hand business machines were priced against a world of cheap memory. In a market where a new equivalent has risen 15 to 20 per cent and shipped with less RAM, a three-year-old 16GB or 32GB corporate laptop is worth a serious look — and it will usually have upgradeable memory. |
| Phones: keep the one you have longer | Roughly 13 per cent on handset prices, with mobile DRAM among the hardest-hit parts, makes an upgrade cycle stretch the obvious response — and it is the response Gartner is already forecasting at market scale. If you are buying, the storage tier is where the increase will bite hardest. |
What we could not establish
Three things, and they matter to how much weight to put on the above. We could not find published Australian-specific figures for finished laptop and phone price rises — the 15 to 20 per cent vendor guidance is global, and how much of it lands here depends on the Australian dollar and on each vendor’s local pricing, neither of which we have modelled. We could not verify current August 2026 Australian retail memory prices from a primary retailer source for this piece; the retail figures above are a January 2026 snapshot and should be treated as a marker of direction, not a current price. And forecasts of when this ends have already been revised repeatedly in one direction, so treat late 2027 as the optimistic edge rather than a plan.
The bottom line
This is not a normal component price cycle, because the buyer on the other side of the table is not a competing device maker — it is an AI build-out with far deeper pockets and a much better margin story than your laptop. Until the fabs that were promised in 2025 and 2026 actually start shipping, consumer memory is the residual claimant on a supply that someone else has already bid for.
For most people the practical instruction is narrow. If you need a machine, buy it with more memory than feels comfortable, prefer one you can open, and do not read a familiar model name as a familiar specification. If you do not need one, the best move available in this market is the boring one: keep what you have running, and spend the money on the upgrade that keeps it useful rather than on a replacement that arrives with less memory than the thing it replaced.
Sources
Figures, quotes and forecasts above are drawn from these sources, captured 15 August 2026:
- TrendForce — AI server demand continues to support memory prices in 3Q26 (3 July 2026): conventional DRAM contract prices up 13 to 18 per cent QoQ and NAND flash up 10 to 15 per cent QoQ in Q3 2026, tight LPDRAM supply, moderating server DRAM gains under long-term agreements, and the quoted statement that consumer PC and smartphone customers are “reaching their affordability limit”.
- Gartner — Surging memory costs will reduce global PC and smartphone shipments in 2026 (26 February 2026): the roughly 130 per cent combined DRAM and SSD price rise, 17 per cent on PC prices and 13 per cent on smartphone prices, PC shipments down 10.4 per cent and smartphone shipments down 8.4 per cent, longer device lifetimes, memory reaching about 23 per cent of PC component costs, and the forecast disappearance of the sub-US$500 PC segment by 2028.
- Tom’s Hardware — HP says memory costs doubled in one quarter, now account for 35 per cent of PC build materials: HP’s 25 February 2026 earnings call, the move from 15 to 18 per cent to about 35 per cent of the bill of materials, CFO Karen Parkhill on memory costs roughly doubling sequentially, and HP’s long-term supply agreements and configuration changes in response.
- CRN Australia — Deep dive: how the memory shortage is impacting the channel: Jason Puschmann of Computer Alliance on the 4TB Samsung SSD moving from close to $500 to $1149 and 16GB RAM from $60 to $200-$300, his “very bloody greedy” remark, Robbie Upcroft of Tech Data ANZ on lead times stretching from one to two weeks to one to two months, Victor Tsaccounis of Hubify on quotes nearly doubling, and Xara Tran of Champions of Change on quote turnaround times.
- CRN Australia — Three channel leaders discuss how they are tackling the memory shortage: Lee Gurd of Computer Alliance on seven-to-fourteen-day pricing validity windows, financing early purchases and warehousing stock, and the strategies described by Tech Data and Champions of Change.
- PCWorld — Memory crunch: mid-range laptops may slide back to 8GB RAM, analyst warns (15 December 2025): TrendForce’s forecast that mid-range laptops shift from 16GB to 8GB and high-end machines settle at 16GB once low-cost inventory is exhausted, with similar reductions expected across smartphone tiers.
- Tom’s Hardware — Microsoft quietly purges 32GB of RAM recommendations from its website: the removal of 32GB guidance and the introduction of 8GB base Surface models during 2026. We were able to read the report’s headline claims but not verify the full list of affected models independently.
- Tom’s Hardware — IDC expects average PC prices to jump by up to 8 per cent in 2026: IDC’s average selling price forecast and the report that some vendors are selling pre-built systems without RAM installed.
- TweakTown — DRAM prices surged by up to 89 per cent in Q2 2026: the Q2 2026 movement, including LPDDR5X up about 89 per cent and DDR4 up as much as 51 per cent.
- PC Gamer — The three big players in memory are all building new factories, but it probably will not help DRAM prices until 2028: new fab timelines, Micron’s Japanese DRAM investment shipping in the second half of 2028, and Samsung and SK hynix accounting for around 70 per cent of the DRAM market while signalling restraint on expansion.
- Rost Glukhov — GPU and RAM prices surge in Australia, January 2026: an independent price-tracking snapshot of Australian retailers recording the cheapest in-stock 32GB DDR5-6000 kits moving from about $499 to $689 in a month, with listed prices at Centrecom, PCCG and Scorptec. A personal technical blog rather than a trade publication, cited here for a dated retail observation only.