#memory-chip-pricing

#memory-chip-pricing

Motorola has enacted price increases of up to 50 percent on the rest of its 2026 Moto G lineup, indicating a shift in pricing strategy for budget smartphones.

Xidian University stated that the new manufacturing method could reduce costs to 'one-hundredth to one-tenth' of current designs, indicating a potential price drop from 100 to between 1 and 10 dollars.

Samsung has reportedly swapped out its homemade OLED panels in some mid-range models for the Chinese CSOT-made OLEDs, aiming to reduce overall costs and avoid raising consumer prices.

After Google released its TurboQuant compression algorithm, which can purportedly drastically reduce the amount of memory required for certain AI workflows, stock prices for memory manufacturers dropped significantly.

With shares going for more than 38.0 times trailing price-to-earnings (P/E), I'm personally in no rush to chase the stock, especially with quarterly earnings just under a week away. That said, some big-name analysts have been bold enough to stay in the bull camp. And that's despite the hot, seemingly overheated run, the relatively stretched multiple, and uncertainties clouding the future of AI.

The gold rush across the high-end processor market might help Apple's processor manufacturing partner, TSMC, drive harder bargains than in the past. That's because Apple's huge appetite for processors is being met by fast-growing demand for chips for servers. As a result, the cost of the chips used inside Macs, iPads, and iPhones will likely increase, putting even more inflationary pressure on Cupertino's bottom line.

AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest-companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.

The memory chip stocks have been really heating up to start the year, thanks in part to the AI-driven RAM shortage, which could last well into the year's end and perhaps beyond. Undoubtedly, AI demand is showing no signs of slowing down, and as the high-performance memory needs continue to blast off, questions linger as to how the top memory players can step up to meet the needs of this unprecedented boom.

Global PC shipments rose by 9.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, however, it is unlikely those increases will continue, due in part to a pending memory shortage that will impact both enterprise and consumer markets. IDC stated in a release that it expects that the PC market will be far different in 12 months, given how quickly the memory situation is evolving.

Just weeks after raising the price of its RAM modules, Framework has announced that it's also increasing the price of its desktop PC in response to the global memory shortage. The Framework Desktop with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 chip now starts at $1,139, instead of $1,099. "We held off on it for as long as we could, but we had to update our Framework Desktop pricing today to account for the massive increase in LPDDR5x pricing from our suppliers," Framework says in a post on X.

Memory shortages will likely stunt PC shipments in 2026, as available supplies will not be able to meet demand thanks to memory makers chasing the lucrative AI infrastructure market instead. Overall PC market performance in 2025 was healthy, according to research biz Omdia, but it notes that memory and storage supply was already tightening, with associated upward price pressure emerging around the middle of last year.