The recent CES 2026 exhibition in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA brought many impressive technology products, but also exposed a worrying reality: the PC industry is facing a challenging year.
The high price of components, especially RAM, along with the huge demand from AI data centers, is creating great pressure on the personal computer and consumer device market.
In fact, signs of difficulties have appeared before CES, when RAM prices soared in the past few months. According to Wonjin Lee, Marketing Director of Samsung, demand from the AI sector is causing serious problems in the supply of semiconductors.
Prices are rising right now and that will affect everyone," Mr. Wonjin Lee said on the sidelines of the exhibition.
A clear example is Dell's new XPS laptop line. XPS 14 and XPS 16 models were once expected to have more accessible prices compared to the previous generation.
However, Dell surprised many people when announcing a starting price of 2,050 USD and 2,200 USD respectively, significantly higher than last year's models.
The fact that the lowest configurations have exceeded the $2,000 mark shows that component cost pressure is directly affecting consumers.
In that context, Apple still maintains a starting price of 1,599 USD for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, although the 16-inch version is still at a high of 2,499 USD. This comparison shows that not every company increases prices sharply, but the general trend of the PC market is still upwards.
In the desktop computer segment, AMD offers a more realistic perspective. David McAfee, Vice President of the Group and General Director of Customer Channel Business of AMD, believes that 2026 may witness a trend of upgrading components instead of replacing the entire system.
The advantage of AM4 and AM5 platforms is that they allow users to upgrade CPUs without replacing RAM or motherboards, which is especially important when memory prices are high.
According to McAfee, about 30-40% of AMD's business operations still revolve around the AM4 platform. Even upgrading from old CPUs such as the 2600 or 3000 series to the 5000 series can bring significant performance improvements without incurring large costs for RAM.
However, he also admitted that no product uses memory that can be immune to DRAM price fluctuations.
The volatility in recent months, according to him, is unprecedented. However, McAfee predicts prices may stabilize in the first three to six months of 2026, although it did not provide a specific explanation.
A small highlight is AMD's X3D CPUs, with large V-cache 3D cache, less affected by slower RAM speeds. This helps them maintain good performance even when memory does not reach optimal levels.
While PC manufacturers are cautious and decline to comment on the unstable situation of the memory market, the big question remains: "Where is the RAM being used?
The answer lies in the new AI supercomputers. NVIDIA introduced the Vera Rubin system with dozens of terabytes of RAM and GPU memory, while AMD announced the Helios system with a similar configuration.
Simply put, global memory supply is being prioritized for the AI industry. This is good news for technology giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft or OpenAI, but bad news for ordinary PC users.
