The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

Memory manufacturers have a fixed wafer capacity that is increasingly being allocated to HBM for AI data centers—expected to reach 20% by 2026, up from 2%. Since HBM consumes over three times the wafer capacity per gigabyte compared to DDR or LPDDR, this shift is constraining RAM production for consumer devices, causing price increases already visible in the sub-$100 smartphone market.