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Tom’s Guide

Technology

Jason England

A major RAM price rise will impact laptops, PCs and GPUs in 2026 — Black Friday is your only chance to survive the surge

Black Friday (Topic) Laptops Walmart Lenovo Memory

The price of laptops, tablets, GPUs and PC components has already been under pressure this year. But now, thanks to the skyrocketing cost of RAM and SSD storage chips, it's looking like retail prices for tech could moon in 2026.

Look, I know you're hearing a whole lot about Black Friday deals right now, so I'll try to not make this sound too dramatic. But this year's sales season could be the last chance you get computing tech at these prices before huge increase next year.

...well the whole not sounding "too dramatic" didn't last long. But the point stands! Let me explain.

What’s happening?

The problem has been quietly growing throughout 2026, but now it's here with a bang thanks to the AI boom. You see, to run the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini, AI companies need to buy a whole lot of silicon for its data centers to handle all of your prompts. The critical chips in all of this are DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) and NAND flash, but you may know them by their other names: RAM and SSD storage respectively.

As the demand for these chips started to skyrocket because of this boom, two things have happened:

The companies that manufacture these types of chips are seeing demand for cheaper, older memory chips vanish, given their biggest customers (companies behind the AI boom) are throwing handfuls of cash at them for the latest stuff. So these older options are being phased out.
Smaller NAND flash chips are being deprioritized in favor of the highest bidders looking to pack their AI data centers with tons of memory.

Both of these together are leading to drastic silicon shortages, which are in turn leading to higher manufacturing costs for PC and smartphone brands, and inevitably, price jumps for us.

How bad could it be?

In one word: bad. In two words: real bad.

One place we can already see it happening in real-time is with DDR5 RAM kits you can buy for your desktop PC. People are finding prices are up to 171% higher compared to 2024. Looking at what I’ve been tracking to buy — the Crucial Pro 32GB DDR5 kit was $174.99, and it’s now $300 in just over one month. That is astonishing.

As for laptops, TrendForce’s latest investigation (reported by TechPowerUp) has this pinned at a predicted 5-15% price rise in 2026. Meanwhile, AMD and Nvidia are already signaling price hikes for their GPUs, and this could be by at least 10%. Combine GPU and RAM jumps, and that could be a massive increase for prebuilt PCs.

But there is a small window of hope

Luckily, a lot of companies do pay attention to this stuff and plan ahead — stockpiling the chips they need to prepare for high demand moments (like Black Friday).

That is why I can confidently say that this is your last chance to grab a laptop, GPU or PC before the big old price surge takes effect. The only one to publicly acknowledge this is happening is Lenovo, but I know other companies are too.

So what you have between now and the end of Cyber Monday is a final chance to grab a laptop at MSRP, a GPU at slightly below MSRP, and a desktop at a reasonable price before the memory surge sends those prices up in smoke.

Surge-proof Black Friday tech deals

Laptop deals

Desktop PC deals

Tablet deals

GPU deals

RAM deals

Don’t wait for something new

To sum up what my chats have been like with people in the industry over the past couple of months in one word, it would be nervous. There’s a lot of new stuff coming down the line like Intel Panther Lake and Snapdragon X2 Elite, and I’m definitely excited to try them out.

But what if it's way too expensive to even consider an upgrade? And at that point, the prices of those older systems have probably gone up with reduced supply anyway. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

One thing I’m noticing from seeing what are the most clicked Black Friday deals on our site is that value for money is so critical. And if this trend continues, that feeling of value is going to evaporate quickly from the tech of 2026.

For more discounts, check out our Black Friday deals live blog.