If you are planning to buy a new laptop, phone, or SSD this year, the price tag is about to look worse, and the reason traces back thousands of kilometres away to a decision made in South Korea.
On 29 June, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung appeared alongside Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to unveil an investment plan worth roughly 800 trillion won, about US$550 billion. The centrepiece is four new memory chip factories in the country's southwest, with Samsung and SK Hynix building two each, plus hundreds of billions more set aside for AI data centres through 2035. Lee called 2026 the year Korea has to become an "irreplaceable" industrial power.
The backdrop is what the industry has nicknamed RAMageddon, a worldwide shortage of memory chips caused by the AI build-out. Data centre operators are buying up high bandwidth memory (HBM) by the truckload, which pushes Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron to steer factory capacity toward those high-margin parts. As Tom's Hardware and TechCrunch report, every wafer that goes to HBM is a wafer that does not go to the ordinary RAM and storage inside the devices you actually buy.
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What rising memory prices mean for Malaysians
The squeeze is already in the numbers. DRAM prices jumped sharply in the second quarter of 2026, with some mobile memory up nearly 90 percent and certain SSDs up more than half. Research firm Gartner expects combined DRAM and SSD costs to climb around 130 percent by the end of the year, which would lift average PC prices by about 17 percent and smartphone prices by roughly 13 percent. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, and Asus have all warned customers of 15 to 20 percent increases.
For Malaysian shoppers, that translates into a simple reality. The mid-range laptop you had in mind for the new semester, or the phone you were saving up for, will likely cost more in ringgit, or quietly ship with less RAM and storage for the same price. AMD has said memory prices may not settle until 2028, so this is not a single bad quarter. If you genuinely need a new machine, buying sooner rather than later is the rational call.
Malaysia sits on both sides of this
Here is the part local coverage tends to miss. The same HBM boom driving up your gadget prices is also the prize Malaysia's own chip industry is chasing. The country already handles close to 13 percent of the world's chip packaging, assembly, and testing, and those activities make up roughly 40 percent of national exports. Under the National Semiconductor Strategy launched in 2024, five local firms (Inari Amertron, Pentamaster, NSW Automation, SkyeChip, and FusionAP) formed the Malaysia Advanced Packaging Consortium with a target of 7 percent of the global advanced packaging market by 2035. Penang-based SkyeChip is going after HBM design and 2.5D and 3D chiplet work, the exact high-value layer the Korean money is doubling down on.
So the AI memory crunch is two things at once for Malaysia: a cost at the checkout counter and an opening for the industry. Whether the country can climb from back-end testing into the higher-margin packaging that HBM needs will decide which side of that ledger it lands on.
For now, the practical takeaway is the boring one. If a new phone or laptop is on your list, the cheapest it is likely to be is today.
Images courtesy of Liam Briese and TECNIC Bioprocess Solutions on Unsplash.