The International Data Corporation (IDC) has revised its outlook for the global PC and smartphone markets, citing worsening memory shortages driven by surging AI infrastructure demand. DRAM and NAND production is being redirected from consumer devices to enterprise-grade AI components, causing PC shipments to potentially drop as much as 9% in 2026 and average selling prices to rise 6–8%. Smartphones may also face up to a 5% contraction with higher prices and longer replacement cycles. While major OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, and ASUS may weather the shortage, smaller vendors and DIY builders face significant challenges, according to Zak Killian of Tom’s Hardware. The shortage coincides with the AI PC push, which requires more memory, making systems more expensive, just as consumer enthusiasm remains muted. IDC warns that this structural memory shortage is reshaping the consumer hardware market at a critical time. Killian writes:
The International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new update to its device market outlook, and the message is blunt: things are getting worse. Under newly-reported pessimistic scenarios, shipments of PCs could shrink by up to 9% in 2026, with a more moderate scenario showing a 5% shrinkage in the market. These figures have been revised from a 2.5% drop, which was recently published in IDC’s November forecast.
Since then, the global memory shortage, which began accelerating in mid-October, has intensified beyond what IDC originally modeled. […]
The underlying driver is the same force distorting much of the tech industry in late 2025: AI infrastructure. Memory demand from hyperscalers has surged so aggressively that DRAM and NAND production has been structurally redirected away from consumer devices and toward high-margin enterprise components like high-bandwidth memory and dense DDR5. […]
It’s the PC market where IDC’s revised outlook feels most disruptive, though. The memory shortage is colliding with two major industry forces at once: the Windows 10 end-of-life refresh cycle and the much-touted push toward “AI PCs.” Vendors are already signaling broad price increases as DRAM and SSD costs climb, and IDC now estimates that PC average selling prices could rise by as much as 6–8% under a pessimistic scenario. […]
There’s a particular irony in how this environment intersects with the industry’s AI PC narrative. IDC defines an AI PC simply as a system with an NPU, but in practice, these machines also demand more RAM. Microsoft’s Copilot+ requirements alone set a 16GB floor, and many premium designs are targeting 32GB or more. The problem is that memory is precisely the component becoming most scarce and expensive. Just as vendors are trying to upsell consumers on AI-branded systems, the economics of building those systems are deteriorating.
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