It’s no secret that demand for AI hardware has increased demand for computer memory. Industry analyst TrendForce expects the contract price for memory to increase by up to 95 percent in the first quarter of 2026, and that comes after similarly aggressive changes through the second half of 2025.

The burden of the surging price has fallen with particular weight on low-cost computing companies like Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi 5, with 16 gigabytes of RAM, has nearly doubled in price from US $120 in November 2025 to $205 today. Framework, a company that makes highly configurable and repairable laptops, has announced two rounds of memory price hikes. Others, such as Orange Pi, have made no official comment, but the price of an Orange Pi 5B with 16 GB of RAM has surged from $160 at the start of 2025 to $312 today.

“If you have a product that’s relatively low cost, the memory is going to be a relatively large portion of it,” says Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton. Most Raspberry Pi computers of a particular model have the same board design and the same hardware components—except for the memory, which can be upgraded to suit the user’s needs. With little else to differentiate them, Raspberry Pi has to pass increased memory costs on to customers.

A Perfect Storm Threatens Low-Cost Computing

The situation is worsened by the way memory is produced. “Generally, you have a single fungible pool of manufacturing capacity in DRAM that you can use to do anything. It can be used to make commodity DRAM, DDR, LPDDR, or you can use it to make HBM [the type most commonly used for AI hardware],” explains Upton.

That means low-cost computer manufacturers are competing for the same pool of manufacturing capacity as AI hardware giants. And with the world’s most valuable tech companies spending billions on AI infrastructure, low-cost computer manufacturers have little hope to negotiate the price.

Larger computer manufacturers can mitigate the memory price shock by negotiating larger or longer contracts in exchange for lower prices, or by tolerating a lower profit margin. Others are rumored to have stocked up on memory as prices surged.

RELATED: How and When the Memory Chip Shortage Will End

But these strategies aren’t available to companies that sell computers at low price points or in lower volumes. The lower price of these computers means there’s not much margin to absorb a price increase. Companies like Raspberry Pi also purchase in lower volumes, which means it’s difficult to negotiate a volume discount.

It’s a perfect storm for low-cost computing and one that, in contrast to 2025’s U.S. tariff hikes, has led to immediate and unavoidable problems. While tariffs did place some pressure on price for low-cost computers, that pressure wasn’t uniformly felt. Raspberry Pi, which manufactures its computers in the United Kingdom, found itself in a better position than those that manufactured in China. The memory price increase, on the other hand, applies to all companies in this industry, no matter where or how manufacturing takes place.

Price Increases With a Side of Reduced Memory Capacity

Companies that build PCs with removable memory are turning toward a bring-your-own-memory approach. Framework offered this option before memory prices increased, but several specialty desktop manufacturers have recently announced similar bring-your-own-RAM options. However, this isn’t possible for many low-cost computers, including those from Raspberry Pi, because they solder the memory to the mainboard.

Instead, Raspberry Pi is using a different strategy. A new iteration of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B moved from a single memory module to a dual-module configuration. “As you can generally buy smaller RAM more easily than larger RAM, we can use a pair of back-to-back modules instead of a single larger one. You have more vendor diversity, more vendor flexibility,” Upton says. He expects the current pricing will remain the same, but the change provides more options when looking to source memory in the future.

Of course, there’s another strategy all low-cost computing companies can use. They can simply offer less memory.

Raspberry Pi introduced a version of the Raspberry Pi 5 with 1 GB of RAM in December 2025. It debuted at $45 and was the only Raspberry Pi 5 model to avoid the February price increase. Raspberry Pi was among the first to do this, and in retrospect the decision looks like the canary in the coal mine.

Analysts predict that price-constrained devices, such as budget smartphones, will soon be forced to cut memory or raise prices (and possibly both). While this has yet to happen with brands well known in North America, there are hints of it in budget phones from brands that are popular internationally. Poco recently added a less expensive 4-GB version of the M7 Plus 5G smartphone and the new Honor X6d smartphone will ship with 4 GB of memory to start, a downgrade from the preceding Honor X6c, which had 6 GB. Both Poco and Honor are based in China.

So, when will memory prices come down or, at least, stop rising?

Upton expects the timing to be similar to past memory price cycles, which means it’s likely to last for at least a few years. “Memory will be expensive this year. It will probably be expensive next year,” he said, adding that he’d be “a little bit surprised” if price increases have not leveled off into 2028. In any case, he cautioned against being too sure of the future. During the chip shortage of 2021 through 2023, companies and consumers worried that inexpensive logic chips were a thing of the past, but the situation eventually returned to normal. “Like all bubbly phenomena, it’s very hard to measure.”