For a year, AI’s hunger for memory chips was a price story: your next laptop or phone would cost more. This week it became a product story. Nothing has scrapped its planned CMF Phone 3 Pro, with a co-founder saying the company could not build a budget phone that felt like “a genuine step forward” while memory prices are this high. It is a new kind of casualty. Not a device that costs more, but a device that will not exist.
Even Apple is flinching #
If anyone can buy its way around a shortage, it is Apple, the largest and most aggressive memory buyer on the planet. Yet chief executive Tim Cook has called the situation “unsustainable”, and the company is now expected to raise prices, with one analyst calling hikes “fairly imminent”. Apple has already killed its cheapest Mac mini over the same pressure. When the best-insulated buyer in tech starts flinching, everyone below it is in trouble.
The whole market is set to shrink #
The clearest sign of damage is at the bottom. Some entry-level phones have already jumped more than 50 per cent in a year, and research firm CCS Insight expects global smartphone shipments to fall 15 per cent in 2026.
The cheap end is being squeezed hardest, because the memory that once went into affordable handsets now goes to data centres instead. The retail market for SSDs has all but vanished, and DDR5 prices show no sign of falling.
Blame the AI memory race #
The cause is upstream. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have been converting production lines to high-bandwidth memory, the pricey kind that feeds AI accelerators, because it earns several times more per wafer than the DRAM in your phone. DRAM prices rose about 90 per cent in a single quarter, HBM capacity is sold out into 2027, and Nvidia has locked in years of supply while it is available.
Consumer gadgets are simply outbid.
Why it matters #
The AI build-out has always had a hidden bill, paid in power, water and now memory. What is new is who pays it. For a year the cost showed up as a slightly pricier phone.
Now it is showing up as a phone that never ships, and a market expected to shrink for the first time in years. The industry spent 2026 arguing about whether AI would take your job. It is quietly deciding which of your devices get to exist.
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