The AI boom is bringing some unexpected side effects, and one of the world’s biggest PC makers just delivered a pretty sobering warning about it.
At the ISC 2026 conference in Germany, Lenovo dropped a reality check on the industry: the sharp rise in prices for essential memory components like DRAM and NAND flash might not be a temporary spike. According to them, these higher prices could become the “new normal” that sticks around well into 2030 and beyond.
The numbers Lenovo shared were striking. Prices surged dramatically from late Q3 into early Q4 2025, hitting levels almost no one saw coming. While the comment started with a bit of light-hearted tone, the message was serious: thanks to massive AI demand, we’re unlikely to go back to the cheaper memory prices we saw at the beginning of 2025.
The core problem is simple: demand is growing much faster than supply. Even though manufacturers are rushing to build new wafer fabs, it’s going to take years before that extra capacity makes a real dent. Lenovo isn’t alone in this view. Micron has already admitted that even its most important customers can’t get everything they need, and Samsung and SK Hynix have echoed similar concerns.
SK Hynix, a major player in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI, is speeding up its expansion plans. The company now wants to nearly double its DRAM wafer capacity by 2030–2031 and triple overall production by around 2034. That’s faster than they originally planned, but many observers still wonder if it will be enough to keep up with the hunger for AI chips.
This shift has been great for memory makers’ profits, but it’s tightening supply for regular consumer-grade DRAM and NAND. That means higher costs are trickling down to everyday products: PCs, laptops, smartphones, SSDs, and cloud services.
For regular people and businesses, the takeaway is pretty clear: upgrading your computer or buying a new device could stay more expensive than we’ve been used to. Lenovo’s outlook suggests we’re moving away from the old boom-and-bust cycle of memory pricing into a new era where prices sit at a permanently higher baseline, all driven by AI.
Of course, innovation in efficiency and new technologies might help soften the blow eventually. But for the next several years at least, it looks like elevated memory prices are here to stay.
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