Lenovo stockpiles RAM to (hopefully) keep laptop prices down

Hey, so…. RAM is getting crazy expensive at the moment. Thanks to a memory supply crunch mostly attributed to the “artificial intelligence” boom and a huge increase in data center demand, prices for consumer-level RAM are so out of control that electronics stores are pricing them like lobster. Lenovo is reportedly stockpiling memory, hoping to avoid huge price changes for its consumer PCs.

That’s the word out of Bloomberg, citing an interview with Lenovo’s Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng. He says that the demand is “unprecedented,” which is why prices on consumer memory are jumping up to stratospheric levels, 100 percent or more in just the last couple of months. Lenovo also says it’s stockpiling other “critical components,” probably including microcontrollers and storage. The company estimates that it has enough memory to keep it supplied through 2026.

With over a quarter of the worldwide market, Lenovo is the largest PC manufacturer by a healthy margin, though brands like Apple, HP, and Dell are more visible outside of China. With that kind of muscle, Lenovo can use economies of scale to cushion itself from the most extreme shifts in the market. But unpredictable impacts such as US president Trump’s seemingly random application of tariffs and other import taxes can still throw big companies for a loop.

Laptops, desktops, phones, tablets, and pretty much everything else that you can broadly call a computer will certainly get more expensive if data center rollout doesn’t slow, as demand for “AI” machine learning and large language model capacity balloons into a worrying economic bubble.

Consumers who want to buy their own RAM and storage are getting the worst of it, as suppliers and retailers pass costs down the line. Some consumer-grade DDR5 modules are doubling or even tripling in price at the moment. Despite the consumer frenzy around Black Friday and holiday shopping, it’s a bad time to upgrade your PC if you’re hoping to save money.