AI Is Eating the World's RAM and Your Next Phone Is Paying for It

Personal devices are getting more expensive. That part is not in dispute. The finger-pointing, however, has landed somewhere interesting: artificial intelligence. ^[1]

The mechanism, we are told, is RAM — random access memory, the kind of chip that lives in your phone, your laptop, your washing machine, and roughly every other piece of personal and industrial electronics you have ever owned. ^[2] RAM prices have, in industry parlance, “exploded” lately — though “exploded” is doing some lifting here, because what we are actually talking about is doubling in lower-end models and quadrupling in others. ^[3] Doubling. Quadrupling. I did mathematics.

It would be one thing if this were the kind of cost shock that arrived, peaked, and receded. It is not. Industry experts are warning that smartphones may regress in quality through 2026 — upcoming lower-end models reportedly set to use weaker chips, just to keep them on shelves at a price the average consumer can still sort of afford. ^[4] The phones are getting worse on purpose, in other words, so the prices do not have to. A consumer-friendly policy. From the manufacturers’ side, certainly. From yours, less so.

And the demand pulling this mess along? AI. The cold, hungry, compute-thirsty machinery of artificial intelligence, training and inferencing away in data centers, hoovering up the world’s RAM supply to feed models that, between us, mostly generate emails and pictures of astronauts riding horses. ^[5] The consumer market gets whatever is left. Which, lately, is less, and worse, and more expensive — in that order.

You might think the high-end buyer is insulated. You would be incorrect. The Nintendo Switch 2 — the next major console from Nintendo, the Japanese video game maker — is reportedly at risk of a price increase. ^[6] The Mario Party plans of families across the country hang in the balance. I will not be the one to tell my loved ones.

To be fair to the AI industry, they are not technically the only thing using RAM. Servers, ordinary enterprise workloads, the occasional scientific simulation — all consume memory. But the trajectory lines all point the same way: more compute, more memory, more data centers, and the consumer aisle gets to be the one that thins out. We are, in effect, being asked to subsidize someone else’s growth model with our devices.

The industry’s own forecast, from the people who actually make the chips, is that this does not ease up soon. RAM producers, it is reported, will need time to adjust capacity to meet demand — and time, in this context, means years. Costs are not expected to recover before 2027 or 2028. ^[7]

So here is the situation, plainly: the technology we already paid for is being slowly downgraded to pay for the technology we are being told we cannot live without. The phone in your pocket next year may, on purpose, do less than the phone in your pocket this year. The console you have been waiting a lifetime for may cost more than it was already going to cost. The trade is being made on your behalf, by people you will never meet, on behalf of products that, generously, are not finished yet.

Make of that what you will. Apparently, we are all just supposed to wait until 2028. In the meantime, lower your expectations and check your bank account — in that order.