Team Partners Telecommunications

Why your next device could cost more than you expect

Posted on Feb 26, 2026

Just recently a leader of one of the UK’s political parties confessed to having failed to register elements of their income as a result of being computer illiterate. Many people reacted in astonishment, how on earth could anyone, let alone someone in the public eye, remain computer illiterate? Isn’t computer literacy something we’ve all been pushed into? Don’t we all now have to know how to operate a keyboard and save a document? And who amongst us doesn’t know their Microsoft from their Mac and their algorithms from their adware? It’s a new language of need; we have to know this stuff to keep up to date…without it, even buying our next mobile phone can be shrouded in unknowns and mystery.

All of which brings us to this month’s blog (is ‘blog’ a computer term? It probably is…), and it’s about RAM. Most of us will know that RAM is to do with computer memory, not least because it stands for Random Access Memory, and that it’s important. We might even know that it’s essentially your device’s short-term memory and that it holds data for active applications to ensure fast performance. The more RAM you have, the greater number of applications you can run simultaneously, and if you haven’t sufficient RAM then your device will slow down, because once you’ve employed all your RAM it will fall back on your slower long-term storage memory, your hard disc. That’s when things start to freeze or lag and you start to swear.

So what? Well, it can’t have escaped you that Artificial Intelligence, AI, is the latest greatest thing and that vast data centres are being built all over the place to supply the massive computer power required. These data centres are, of course, computers, and all computers require…RAM, and with the major RAM manufacturers concentrating their efforts on supplying the needs of data centres, the needs of the domestic computer manufactures aren’t being met. Reports suggest that roughly 40% of world RAM production is being diverted to data centres. Ouch.

It gets worse. Out of the top three RAM producers one, Micron, has always focussed on the consumer market. In December ‘25 it announced that it’s leaving this market in ’26 to concentrate on AI. Buying RAM now will cost you roughly four times what it did just three months ago. Of course, most of us tend not to buy RAM on its own, we buy it embedded in our new devices, so these alarming price rises haven’t worked their way through to consumer buyers yet, but they’re about to. Manufacturers may absorb some of these additional costs, they may cheapen other components, or limit RAM, or simply increase prices.

Our advice? Buy you intended new devices sooner rather than later. It may be three or four years before production catches up with demand again.