The consumer electronics market has a new enemy: AI
Let me start with an apology. Amid all the daily mayhem we have witnessed in the news in 2025 and 2026, I confess that I have not been paying as much attention to the memory shortage as I probably should have done.
Maybe it’s because we’ve had memory shortages before. Many times before. And we’ve had gluts too. So there’s an understandable reluctance to get too carried away when it comes to writing about memory shortages because, for the most part, they sort themselves out.
As we’ve seen with so many other issues, humans have a gift of becoming accustomed to what was once inconvenient if it happens often enough to become something they can learn to adapt to.
That said, IDC didn’t mince its words in a blog post about the memory shortages last month headlined: Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis & the Potential Impact on the Smartphone and PC Markets in 2026. “The memory market is at an unprecedented inflexion point, with demand materially outpacing supply,” it warned. “For an industry that has long been characterised by boom-and-bust cycles, this time is different.”
IDC noted that the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and workloads was exerting significant pressure on the memory ecosystem, shifting manufacturing capacity away from consumer electronics toward high-margin memory solutions to support AI. This has led to restricted supply of general-purpose memory modules and driven up prices across the board.
In case anyone is tempted to remain sanguine about the situation, IDC added: “The timing of the memory shortage creates a perfect storm for the PC industry, colliding with the Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-life refresh cycle and the AI PC marketing push.”
While I’m concentrating on PCs here, I should mention that this shift is also affecting smartphones with flagship models in 2026 unlikely to receive memory upgrades, an increase in average selling prices and a potential contraction in the overall market.
Anyway, back to PCs. You may not have been aware but 2025 was ‘The Year of the AI PC’, not to be confused with 2024, which Microsoft described as the year of ‘AI-powered Windows PCs’. Assuming you didn’t celebrate either of those years, the bad news would seem to be that if 2026 is your year of the AI PC, it could be more expensive than it was in 2024 or 2025.
IDC states quite bluntly that “the shortage threatens to derail the industry’s growth narrative around AI PC. 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.”
As an aside, I must say I like the use of the word “narrative” in that context. You might be forgiven for thinking that the “narrative” of growth from the industry appears to be more substantive than actual AI PC growth.
Still, there’s an amusing irony that the shift in memory production created by AI infrastructure and workloads has led to an accompanying shortage of memory required for smartphones and PCs. In some ways, it’s a little bit akin to the debate about the negative impact of energy and water demands for AI infrastructure on the supply of those resources to us ordinary humans and fears that the data centre will take precedence over the personal.
Predictions that the smartphone and PC markets will face a period of higher costs, altered product roadmaps, and slower volume growth are eerily similar to the warnings of what you and I might face from the distortionary effects of AI in terms of energy, water, growth and, to be brutally honest, our own ‘product roadmap’.
And maybe 2026 won’t be The year of the AI PC after all.
Anyway, if things get really bad, it might be worth remembering that way back when, before any of our times, there was a song called Thanks tor the Memory by Sarah Vaughan which featured the following lyrics:
“Many’s the time that we feasted
And many’s the time that we fasted,
Oh well, it was swell while it lasted.”
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