The RAM Price Shock: Second-Order Effects

The AI boom was supposed to be about software. In early 2026 it quietly raised the price of your laptop. Memory chips share production lines, and one bit of HBM for AI data centers consumes roughly three times the resources of one bit of standard DRAM. As memory makers shifted capacity toward HBM, conventional DRAM supply contracted, and ordinary memory contract prices spiked about 90% in a single quarter. Memory jumped from 15-18% of a PC's bill of materials to roughly 35%, with Intel's CEO warning relief was unlikely before 2028.

For founders and operators, this case sharpens the skill that separates people who see opportunity from people who arrive late: tracing a chain of causation one or two steps past the obvious. The visible winners of any boom are already priced in; the edge lives in what the boom is quietly doing to something adjacent. Learning to map those downstream effects in your own market, before everyone else connects the dots, is what the app trains.