AI demand drains memory supply: PCs are never getting cheap again
APPSO · wechat · 2026-11-01
Intel fell nearly 30% in a day, erasing $140B in market value, partly on PC market gloom. Apple's new 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at ¥15,999 and the iMac entry model was cut, as budget PCs vanish industry-wide.
The driver: AI's pull on upstream memory and storage. Memory/SSD now make up 40% of PC cost (up from 15%); TrendForce sees Q4 DRAM contract prices up 10-15% and enterprise SSD demand up 80%+ in 2026. RTX 5090 spot prices hit ¥53,000+ as teams buy them for local LLM inference, and even RTX 5060 broke ¥3,000. Counterpoint reports global PC shipments fell 21% YoY in Q3, expected -27% in Q4; SK Hynix expects the memory shortage to last until 2030.
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