April 20, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few weeks ago, when we talked about the price increases on main memory and flash for Power Systems machines as well as some other price increases, we told you that this would probably not be the end of it. The market for DRAM and flash is so crazy right now that demand is well exceeding supply and that is driving up prices almost continuously. That’s because supply cannot be increased for either.
To that end, Sam Werner, general manager of IBM Storage, and Ivo Körner, vice president of worldwide sales for IBM Power, Cloud, and Storage, sent out a letter to business partners on April 10 that warns customers that price changes for storage could be made monthly, on the first of each month, “as required to reflect market conditions.”
The letter from Werner and Körner was clear that prices will be honored and locked the moment an order is placed and will not be changed by any price hikes subsequent to when an order is placed and the machinery is delivered. That said, business partners are also being told that going forward, all quotes to customers will expire at the end of month and also that they will need to refresh any system configurations that are in process at the beginning of every month.
I didn’t catch wind of the May 1 price hike, which was announced on April 10 as well, until late in the day on April 13, and we were already long since on press with our Monday issue. Which is why we are telling you about it now. As with the April 1 price hike, which I told you about here, there has been no formal customer announcement letter that I can point you to.
These price changes are cumulative. So if you had a price of something before April 1, you have to add in the April price hike and then the May 1 price hike, and in many cases, the cost of DRAM or flash modules has nearly than doubled in two months. In some cases, the price hikes are a lot larger than that.
The announcement letter to business partners provided “directional price changes” that IBM said could vary by configuration and timing, as follows:
- FlashSystem X600 and C200 models, up 45 percent
- Previous generation FlashSystem models, up 65 percent
- IBM SAN Volume Controller nodes, up 10 percent
- DS8000 R9 SAN storage arrays, up 90 percent
- DS8000 G10 SAN storage arrays, up 25 percent
- Virtual Tape System, up 20 percent
- Deep Archive Servers (excluding attached libraries), up 275 percent
- Diamondback tape drives, up 20 percent
- Ready Node servers, up 40 percent, and
- Power Systems servers, up 16 percent and by which we assume IBM means the base server chassis
The price on industry standard DIMM memory for Power Systems machines – which come in 32 GB, 64 GB, or 128 GB modules using DDR4 memory – have doubled. The price on higher-end differential DIMM memory has been increased by 25 percent, 30 percent, or 35 percent, depending on the type of memory and the machine it is used in. Buried in the memory announcement was a 66 percent price increase on the four-core Power11 processor that runs at a base 3.6 GHz.
As we said a few weeks ago, machines are only going to get more expensive as 2026 rolls on. So if you need to get a new system or do an upgrade, get the lead out. This supply-demand imbalance is not going away any time soon. The GenAI boom has made the hyperscalers, the cloud builders, and the AI model builders want big wonking CPUs with heavy memory and flash configurations to push the performance of their servers laden with GPUs and XPUs.
What we hear, in fact, is that all of the GPUs, all of the HBM memory, and all of the CPUs that can be made in 2026 have already been allocated to their customers and channels. IBM controls its own fate with Power10 and Power11 CPUs, of course, and in such an environment, it could probably sell a bunch if it actually had any appreciable volume made by Samsung, its foundry partner, and stockpiled in a barn somewhere.
We strongly suspect that this is not the case, but we could be wrong. It would have been nice if Power10 and Power11 had kept support for NVLink ports for memory coherency with the Nvidia GPUs and their HBM memory.
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