This year has been plagued by price hikes and skyrocketing RAM prices. Unfortunately, it may be the “new normal” according to Lenovo.
At a recent conference, Lenovo said that DRAM and NAND prices will “never” return to pre-2025 levels. And this is despite companies like Micron and SK Hynix building new fabs and adding capacities to try to meet the supply gap.
The “never” was apparently presented as a joke, per the German site ComputerBase. The company’s presenter then went on to say that higher prices would be the “new normal” in 2030 and beyond.
It’s not a comforting statement from a company that has been quite open about the RAM crisis spiking prices and changing their computing strategy. Memory and storage prices have come down a bit since a peak in April, but they’re still hundreds of dollars more expensive than they were a year ago.
And we can see the impact on gaming with Xbox raising prices again and Apple issuing broad price increases this week.
Shifting blame
AI is to blame for the ongoing memory crisis. Datacenters that power large language models and other AI tools are demanding and have bought up most of the capacity of the big three memory manufacturers: Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix.
Micron’s chief business officer didn’t blame its biggest customer for the memory shortage this week and instead obliquely hinted that Apple is behind it to the Wall Street Journal.
In his remarks, CBO Sumit Sadana didn’t name the Cupertino giant but suggested that tough supplier negotiations meant the company couldn’t invest in more fabs or capacities.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive. A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins,” Sadana told the WSJ.
Micron is a memory supplier for Apple, providing DRAM and NAND chips that are used in iPhones, Macs and iPads. Apple has been known to push for long-term purchasing contracts, where other companies might only get short-term six-month to one-year deals.
Sadana’s comments surfaced just as Apple announced its price increases.
Apple’s outgoing CEO warned about price hikes in an interview with the Wall Street Journal a week ago, calling the shortage a “hundred-year flood.” He pointedly blamed the demand for high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers that shrinks the memory supply for consumer devices like the MacBook Neo.
For now, you’re screwed because some guy on LinkedIn wants to generate a picture of a cat dressed as Napoleon taking over Disneyland and call it “good business.”
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