Hold on to Your Hardware

A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.

For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable. Upgrades were routine, almost casual. If you needed more RAM, a bigger SSD, or a faster CPU or GPU, you barely had to wait a week for a discount offer and you moved on with your life. This era is ending.

What’s forming now isn’t just another pricing cycle or a short-term shortage, it is a structural shift in the hardware industry that paints a deeply grim outlook for consumers. Today, I am urging you to hold on to your hardware, as you may not be able to replace it affordably in the future. While I have always been a stark critic of today’s consumer industry, as well as the ideas behind it, and a strong proponent of buying it for life (meaning, investing into durable, repairable, quality products) the industry’s shift has nothing to do with the protection of valuable resources or the environment, but is instead a move towards a trajectory that has the potential to erode technological self-sufficiency and independence for people all over the world.

The RAM-pocalypse

In recent months the buzzword RAM-pocalypse has started popping up across tech journalism and enthusiast circles. It’s an intentionally dramatic term that describes the sharp increase in RAM prices, primarily driven by high demand from data centers and “AI” technology, which most people had considered a mere blip in the market. This presumed temporary blip, however, turned out to be a lot more than just that, with one manufacturer after the other openly stating that prices will continue to rise, with suppliers forecasting shortages of specific components that could last well beyond 2028, and with key players like Western Digital and Micron either completely disregarding or even exiting the consumer market altogether.

Note: Micron wasn’t just another supplier, but one of the three major players directly serving consumers with reasonably priced, widely available RAM and SSDs. Its departure leaves the consumer memory market effectively in the hands of only two companies: Samsung and SK Hynix. This duopoly certainly doesn’t compete on your wallet’s behalf, and it definitely wouldn’t be the first time it would optimize for margins.

The RAM-pocalypse isn’t just a temporary headline anymore, but has seemingly become long-term reality. However, RAM and memory in general is only the beginning.

Wait, why is this happening?

The main reason for the shortages and hence the increased prices is data center demand, specifically from “AI” companies. These data centers require mind-boggling amounts of hardware, specifically RAM, storage drives and GPUs, which in turn are RAM-heavy graphics units for “AI” workloads. The enterprise demand for specific components simply outpaces the current global production capacity, and outbids the comparatively poor consumer market.

For example, OpenAI’s Stargate project alone reportedly requires approximately 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, which could account for roughly 40% of current global DRAM output. Other big tech giants including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have placed open-ended orders with memory suppliers, accepting as much supply as available. The existing and future data centers for/of these companies are expected to consume 70% of all memory chips produced in 2026.

However, memory is just the first domino.

The first domino

RAM and SSDs are where the pain is most visible today, but rest assured that the same forces are quietly reshaping all aspects of consumer hardware. One of the most immediate and tangible consequences of this broader supply-chain realignment are sharp, cascading price hikes across consumer electronics, with LPDDR memory standing out as an early pressure point that most consumers didn’t recognize until it was already unavoidable.

LPDDR is used in smartphones, laptops, tablets, handheld consoles, routers, and increasingly even low-power PCs. It sits at the intersection of consumer demand and enterprise prioritization, making it uniquely vulnerable when manufacturers reallocate capacity toward “AI” accelerators, servers, and data-center-grade memory, where margins are higher and contracts are long-term. As fabs shift production toward HBM and server DRAM, as well as GPU wafers, consumer hardware production quietly becomes non-essential, tightening supply just as devices become more power- and memory-hungry, all while continuing on their path to remain frustratingly unserviceable and un-upgradable.

The result is a ripple effect, in which device makers pay more for chips and memory and pass those costs on through higher retail prices, cut base configurations to preserve margins, or lock features behind premium tiers. At the same time, consumers lose the ability to compensate by upgrading later, because most components these days, like LPDDR, are soldered down by design. This is further amplified by scarcity, as even modest supply disruptions can spike prices disproportionately in a market where just a few suppliers dominate, turning what should be incremental cost increases into sudden jumps that affect entire product categories at once.

In practice, this means that phones, ultrabooks, and embedded devices are becoming more expensive overnight, not because of new features, but because the invisible silicon inside them has quietly become a contested resource in a world that no longer builds hardware primarily for consumers.

Everything is sold out

In late January 2026, the Western Digital CEO confirmed during an earnings call that the company’s entire HDD production capacity for calendar year 2026 is already sold out. Let that sink in for a moment. Q1 hasn’t even ended and a major hard drive manufacturer has zero remaining capacity for the year. Firm purchase orders are in place with its top customers, and long-term agreements already extend into 2027 and 2028. Consumer revenue now accounts for just 5% of Western Digital’s total sales, while cloud and enterprise clients make up 89%. The company has, for all practical purposes, stopped being a consumer storage company.

And Western Digital is not alone. Kioxia, one of the world’s largest NAND flash manufacturers, admitted that its entire 2026 production volume is already in a “sold out” state, with the company expecting tight supply to persist through at least 2027 and long-term customers facing 30% or higher year-on-year price increases. Adding to this, the Silicon Motion CEO put it bluntly during a recent earnings call:

We’re facing what has never happened before: HDD, DRAM, HBM, NAND… all in severe shortage in 2026.

In addition, the Phison CEO has gone even further, warning that the NAND shortage could persist until 2030, and that it risks the “destruction” of entire segments of the consumer electronics industry. He also noted that factories are now demanding prepayment for capacity three years in advance, an unprecedented practice that effectively locks out smaller players.

Collateral damage

The collateral damage of this can already be felt, and it’s significant. For example Valve confirmed that the Steam Deck OLED is now out of stock intermittently in multiple regions “due to memory and storage shortages”. All models are currently unavailable in the US and Canada, the cheaper LCD model has been discontinued entirely, and there is no timeline for when supply will return to normal. Valve has also been forced to delay the pricing and launch details for its upcoming Steam Machine console and Steam Frame VR headset, directly citing memory and storage shortages.

At the same time, Sony is