Insight - Hardware & Procurement
Why Has Hardware Become So Expensive.
The AI boom is being paid for, in part, at the laptop counter. Here's the plain-English explanation of what happened to component prices, how long it's likely to last, and what a sensible hardware plan looks like in the meantime.
Addooco IT | August 2026 | 5 min read
+130%
Memory Cost
Forecast rise in memory cost through 2026 (Gartner).
95%
Three Makers
Of the world's DRAM comes from just three manufacturers.
2027
Earliest Relief
The earliest point analysts expect meaningful relief.
The Short Version
If you've quoted for kit lately, you've noticed.
If you have quoted for laptops, workstations or servers in the last year, you will have noticed something: the same specification costs materially more than it did, and the quote doesn't stay valid for long. This is not a supplier taking liberties. It is the single biggest shift in component pricing the industry has seen in a decade.
01 - AI Ate The Memory Market
Almost every device you buy contains two kinds of memory chip: DRAM, the working memory, and NAND flash, the storage. Three companies - Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron - make the overwhelming majority of the world's DRAM.
Those same three also make high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM that sits alongside AI accelerators in data centres. HBM sells at far better margins, and the hyperscalers buying it commit to volumes years in advance. So the manufacturers moved production capacity across.
02 - The Arithmetic Problem
Every wafer that becomes high-bandwidth memory is a wafer that does not become the DDR5 in a laptop - and because HBM uses more silicon per usable gigabit, the switch removes more ordinary memory from the market than the headline figures suggest. Supply of the boring stuff shrank at exactly the moment demand for it held firm.
Conventional DRAM Contract Prices
Change quarter on quarter, 2026 - TrendForce estimates.
+90-95%
Q1 2026
Contract price rise on the previous quarter.
+58-63%
Q2 2026
On top of Q1's rise. A slower rate of rise is not the same as a fall.
Not An Ordinary Cycle
The market has stopped behaving normally.
03 - The Price Inversion
Older DDR4 memory - the kind in machines you bought five years ago - has at points been more expensive per gigabit than cutting-edge memory. In a healthy market, last generation's technology is always the cheap option. That relationship has broken, because the fabs that churned out legacy chips have been repurposed.
04 - The Knock-On Effects
Storage has followed memory upwards. Machines ship with less memory as standard. Graphics cards, consoles and phones are caught in the same squeeze - all on top of exchange rates, freight, tariffs and a wave of refresh demand from organisations that moved off Windows 10.
Previous shortages were caused by accidents. This one is a business decision - which is why it will last longer.
What This Means For Your Budget
Three things change.
Practically: quotes have a shorter shelf life, lead times are less predictable, and the specification you assumed was standard may quietly have become an upgrade.
None of that is a reason to panic-buy. It is a reason to plan further ahead than you are used to, and to make refresh decisions on evidence rather than habit.
Weeks
Quote Shelf Life
The component cost underneath quotes is moving weekly rather than quarterly.
Longer
Lead Times
Less predictable, particularly for higher-memory configurations and servers.
16GB
No Longer A Given
At the budget end of the range, standard specs have quietly become upgrades.
What We'd Do In Your Position
Plan on evidence, not habit.
Five practical steps that make a real difference to hardware spend in this market.
01
Know Your Estate
You can't plan a refresh you can't see. An accurate estate list - age, warranty, security support, battery and disk health - turns a guess into a schedule.
02
Stretch What Deserves It
A supported three-year-old laptop with a new SSD and battery is usually better value than a compromised new one. A machine out of security support is not - that's a risk, not a saving.
03
Standardise On Fewer Models
Two or three well-chosen builds give us volume to negotiate with, simpler spares, and far less time lost to one-off support problems.
04
Buy For The Role
Memory nobody uses has never been more expensive. Match the build to the actual workload and put the saving where it earns something back.
05
Forecast, Then Buy In Batches
Tell us what you expect to need over the next 6-12 months. One combined order almost always beats buying one at a time - better pricing, fewer surprises, one delivery to plan around.
The honest summary: hardware is more expensive because the world's memory supply has been redirected to AI, and that redirection is profitable enough to continue. You can control how visible your estate is, how far ahead you plan, and how much you spend on capacity nobody uses - and in this market those three things are worth real money.
Frequently Asked Questions
The questions our clients are asking.
Not quickly. This shortage was created by manufacturers choosing to make more profitable AI memory, and new fabrication capacity takes years rather than months to bring online. Most analysts point to mid-2027 at the earliest for meaningful relief, and some in the industry expect constraints beyond that. Budgeting on the assumption that prices fall this year is a gamble; budgeting for flat-to-higher costs and being pleasantly surprised is not.
It depends entirely on the device. If a machine is out of warranty, out of security support or actively slowing someone down, waiting costs you more than buying – in lost productivity and in the price rise you’ll pay anyway. If it has genuine life left, wait and spend the money on extending it. The point is to make that call per device, on evidence, rather than deferring everything or panic-buying everything.
Usually, yes, and in this market it is often the best-value option available. An SSD upgrade, a battery replacement, a clean rebuild and some memory housekeeping can return a three or four-year-old laptop to comfortable everyday performance. The limits are security and support: once a device stops receiving updates or the manufacturer stops supplying parts, extending it stops being a saving and starts being a risk. We’ll tell you honestly which side of that line each machine sits on.
Because the component cost behind it changed. Distributor pricing on memory and storage has been moving week to week, and manufacturers have been adjusting list prices mid-cycle – something that used to happen once or twice a year. We quote against live cost rather than a stale price list, and we tell you how long each figure is valid so you can approve it inside that window. If a quote has expired, it is not a negotiating tactic; it is the market having moved.
Yes. Servers are the most memory-dense equipment most businesses buy, so they have seen some of the sharpest increases, and high-capacity storage arrays are affected by the same NAND squeeze. Networking hardware is less exposed but not immune. Cloud is not a way out either – the hyperscalers are buying the same components, and that cost eventually reaches list prices for compute and storage.
Let's Make IT Happen
Send us your device list and we'll come back with a refresh plan and pricing you can budget against.
Figures cited from published analyst commentary (Gartner, IDC, TrendForce) as at August 2026. Market conditions are moving quickly - we'll confirm current pricing at the point of quotation.