Technology industry experts have warned that the global memory chip shortage, which is fuelling a sharp rise in the price in computer and smartphone pricing, is likely not a short-term spike and will affect both the IT industry and those adjacent to it.
Mustek chief technology officer Dimitri Tserpes told TechCentral this week that the RAM shortage does not only affect computers, TVs and gaming consoles, but other electronic devices – washing machines, cars and fridges.
“Anything that has an embedded computer in it must have DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) to go with it, and prices are skyrocketing,” said Tserpes.
“You can call a supplier in another time zone to get a quotation in the morning and be given one amount; by the time you call them back to make an order – eight hours later – prices have already gone up.”
In some cases, the price of DRAM chips has surged more the 250% in recent months. These changes are driven by the explosion in data centre capacity to underpin the anticipated boom in demand for AI tools and services. As demand for high-end AI GPUs, or graphics chips, made by Nvidia and others continues to soar to record highs, so, too, does the need for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips and storage to support it.
Higher margins
For manufacturers, the margins on HBM chips are so much higher than on traditional DRAM that it is far more profitable to swap out DRAM production lines for HBM production, leading to the shortage in DRAM. A similar shift is taking place in solid-state storage, where manufacturers are focusing on higher-margin enterprise-ready solid-state drives used in AI data centres and neglecting consumer NAND flash storage used in PCs and other electronic gadgets.
Read: Nvidia’s next AI chips are in full production
Zooming into the computer hardware industry, Tserpes said the effects of price hikes will not immediately be felt by large, global-scale producers, which typically have contracts with manufacturers that guarantee supply in cycles of at least three years.
Read: Windows 10 ‘end of life’ is here, forcing tough business choices
“[The likes of] Apple and Samsung will have no issues getting RAM, but smaller suppliers may suffer from late shipments or even contractual breaches where the manufacturer opts to pay the penalty for breach from the profits they make on HBM,” said Tserpes.
Enterprise customers and consumers are among those most likely to feel the pinch. Speaking to TechCentral on Tuesday, Pinnacle CEO Tim Humphreys-Davies said the cost of server computing projects have increased by about 40% between the end of 2025 and the start of the new year, forcing clients either to absorb the higher capital outlay or scale back their spending.
Humphreys-Davies said the cost increases are not as severe in the laptop and PC markets, where prices have risen but not as quickly. Part of this is due to the buffering effect of a stronger rand against the US dollar. The rand strengthened by 13% against the dollar in 2025, the largest annual gain in 16 years. By midday on Tuesday, it was changing hands at R16.45/$.
Given that several large-scale hardware manufacturers, including Nvidia, Micron and Solidigm, all halted or slowed production for the consumer market in 2025, Humphreys-Davies predicts that shortages in consumer GPUs, RAM and storage are going to persist for the next few years.
AI computing also has an impact on consumer and enterprise demand, where end users looking to run AI applications are drawn to high-end computers that feature embedded neural processing units (NPUs) that allow for AI models to be run locally, thereby improving efficiency and, in some cases, enhancing data security. Running local AI models requires a ton of RAM – at least 32GB, but preferably much more than that for larger models.
‘Bumpy ride’
The market could normalise, but only if the AI bubble bursts or new large-scale production is realised, but this is unlikely. Mustek’s Tserpes said: “It is going to be a long and bumpy ride”. Pinnacle’s Humpreys-Davies agreed.
“Is it going to get better? No. Investment cycles are long, so getting new factories up will take time. Our advice to resellers right now is, if they have clients who have projects, then it is better [to implement] sooner rather than later. It may be a good idea to capitalise on the exchange rate while the rand is relatively strong against the dollar,” said Humphreys-Davies. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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