How your business can beat the PC memory crisis

PC memory and storage prices are rocketing. High demand for RAM from the AI industry has led to a crippling shortage of components, which is sending their prices skywards. The knock-on effect is that PCs (both desktops and laptops) are likely to get significantly more expensive in 2026 and beyond.

If you’re buying new PC hardware for your business, here’s what you need to know and how you can best protect yourself from the memory crisis.

How bad is the memory crisis?

It’s very bad. Huge demand from the AI industry to equip forthcoming data centres has led to a massive shortage of components, because it’s not possible to quickly scale the production of RAM and SSDs. It takes years for new factories to come online, assuming that the component manufacturers are even willing to invest in new facilities in the first place – many are wary that this is merely a short-term spike, and don’t want to be left with expensive facilities running below capacity in five years’ time.

The knock-on effects for the PC industry are enormous, possibly catastrophic for some companies. “Memory shortages are affecting the entire industry, and the impact will likely reshape market dynamics over the next two years,” said Jitesh Ubrani, Research Manager at IDC in a report published earlier this week.

“Beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems, already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications be lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand.”

He added that smaller PC brands “may not survive”, with the big brands able to “leverage their scale and memory allocations to capture shares from smaller and regional vendors”.

Order now

As IDC noted, this crisis isn’t going to resolve itself anytime soon. Prices aren’t expected to stabilise until well into 2027, and even then they’re probably not coming back down. As relatively expensive as memory and storage is now, it’s only going to get worse in the short-to-medium term.

In which case, if your company needs a PC hardware refresh in 2026 or even 2027, it’s worth getting your order in now. With predictions of PC shipments stalling or even falling in 2026, PC vendors and resellers may be glad of the orders and willing to strike a deal, perhaps even fixing prices for repeat business later in the year.

Don’t over spec

As IDC noted, PC manufacturers are already being less generous with specifications to preserve their inventories. This means it’s going to be an expensive time to kit out new hardware with 32GB or 64GB of RAM, or terabytes of SSD storage.

Although received wisdom is to generally err on the side of over-speccing to future-proof machines in your fleet, now may not be the time. Machines designed for everyday office tasks can easily get by with 16GB of RAM. With cloud storage more prevalent, a 512GB or even a 256GB SSD may suffice.

If you buy the right hardware, you can always upgrade the memory/SSD in the future, which brings us to…

Choose upgradeable laptops

The trend in recent years is for laptops and even desktop PCs to be less upgradable. CPUs and RAM are often soldered to motherboards, SSDs might not be upgradeable. However, a push for greater repairability has driven some manufacturers to make components such as RAM and SSDs more accessible, meaning they could be upgraded in the future.

Just last week at CES, we saw Lenovo unveil the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14, where anyone can remove a few Philips-head screws and replace components such as the SSD, battery and even the keyboard (sadly the memory is embedded). If you’re forced to skimp on specifications now to meet your hardware budget, it’s worth prioritising upgradeable models so that you can boost their memory or increase storage in years to come, if required.

Consider refurbished hardware

Another way to make hardware budgets stretch further is to buy refurbished hardware. This is certainly easier for small business than big enterprises, but professional refurbishers will ensure all hardware is checked and cleaned, that previous data has been wiped, and that your refurbished machine comes with the appropriate OS licenses etc.

Refurbished hardware is likely to see the same upward drag on prices as new kit, so again it will probably pay to get in their early this year.

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