Lenovo is warning partners of an imminent price increase that will also affect the business segment. RAM shortages are the underlying cause.
Starting in March, Lenovo will pass on the higher costs of RAM to PC and server customers. This was reported by CRN based on a message sent to Lenovo channel partners in the US.
The price increase is no surprise. After all, RAM prices are on a steep rise. Manufacturers have only limited stocks of memory. Once those are exhausted, they must purchase RAM themselves at higher prices. Furthermore, margins on devices such as entry-level and mid-range laptops are not very large. The result is predictable: manufacturers pass the price increase on to the end customer.
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Why RAM is becoming ever more expensive, and SSD’s follow suit
Notably, Lenovo is announcing a price increase for both servers and PCs starting in March. The manufacturer advises customers to place orders in time before prices rise. Even then, Lenovo is hedging its bets. The price of orders that are not shipped before March 31 may still be revised. At that point, Lenovo will have to use more expensive RAM itself.
AI is to Blame
The cause of the price increase can be found in the AI hype. The companies behind the major AI models, such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta, want to build massive data center capacity as quickly as possible, featuring servers suitable for AI training and inference. These servers contain AI accelerators, such as Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. AI accelerators have one thing in common: they require a lot of on-chip memory. For high-end models, this involves HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). For example, a single Blackwell B200 has 192 GB of HBM3E memory on board. For its successor, Rubin, the situation is similar.
The world has only a handful of major memory manufacturers. They have limited production capacity: demand from AI far exceeds supply. Moreover, HBM is produced on the same lines as RAM, but HBM is more profitable. Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix are therefore choosing to dedicate their limited production capacity largely to the more profitable HBM production. This exacerbates RAM shortages and drives prices up significantly.
Planned price increase
Manufacturers of smartphones, PCs, and servers cannot shoulder the massive price increase. Dell already announced in late 2025 that it would raise prices, and HP stated then that it planned to do the same in the spring of this year. Lenovo also indicated that prices would fluctuate in 2026. The current price increase is the result of that.
Distributors will, in turn, pass on higher prices to end customers in all segments. Hardware is therefore becoming a lot more expensive. Manufacturers will likely also bring configurations with less RAM to market to keep entry-level prices attractive.
Furthermore, it is not only RAM that is becoming more expensive. AI clusters need fast storage to feed all that HBM memory. This results in a high demand for SSDs. There, too, demand is higher than supply, causing the price of SSDs to skyrocket as well.