If your next phone or laptop feels more expensive than it should, and somehow comes with less memory than last year's model, you are not imagining it. The reason sits far from any shop in Malaysia. The artificial intelligence boom is quietly eating the world's memory supply, and consumer buyers are near the end of the queue.
Editor
Dinesh Raj chevron_right
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Google just said the quiet part out loud
On 24 July, Google confirmed that its next flagship, the Pixel 11, will cost more than the model it replaces, and said it is reworking Android to use less memory. Reports put the base Pixel 11 at around US$899, roughly RM3,800 before local tax and margin, up about US$100 from the Pixel 10. Leaked listings suggest the entry model ships with 8GB of RAM, below Google's own stated 12GB minimum for its Gemini AI features, and that the cheapest 128GB storage tier has been dropped. Official pricing is due at Google's hardware event on 12 August.
Google is not alone, and it is not really the story. It is the first big name to admit in public what the whole industry has been swallowing for months.
Why memory suddenly costs a fortune
A single gigabyte of the mobile RAM used in phones sold for about US$2.80 in 2025. In 2026 it commands around US$12, a near sixfold jump. The cause is not a factory fire or a shortage of raw materials. It is a deliberate choice. Just three companies, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, make more than 90 percent of the world's memory, and all three have shifted their production lines toward high bandwidth memory, the specialised chips that AI data centres buy by the rack. Those chips carry far fatter margins, so ordinary phone and laptop memory gets whatever capacity is left over.
The numbers downstream are stark. Research firm TrendForce recorded DRAM contract prices climbing about 90 percent in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Gartner expects combined memory and storage costs to push average PC prices up by roughly 17 percent and smartphone prices by about 13 percent by the end of the year. SK Hynix has warned the squeeze could run past 2030.
What it means for Malaysian buyers
For shoppers here, the pain arrives in two shapes. The mid-range laptop you had budgeted for the new semester will cost more in ringgit, or it will quietly ship with less RAM and storage for the same price. Major brands including Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and Asus have already flagged increases of 15 to 20 percent, and 16GB is fast becoming the sensible floor for a laptop as 8GB models get pushed into the sub-RM1,800 entry tier.
There is a local irony worth sitting with. Malaysia has spent the past year courting exactly the AI infrastructure that is driving these prices up. YTL Power's Nvidia-powered data centre in Johor, part of a project worth more than RM10 billion, runs on the same class of memory-hungry hardware that is starving consumer supply. The country is hosting the demand and paying the retail bill at the same time. We covered the supply side of this when South Korea pledged over US$550 billion to ease the crunch. This is what it looks like when it reaches the till.
The takeaway
If you genuinely need a new phone or laptop in the next few months, buying sooner rather than later is defensible for once, because prices are still edging up through the second half of 2026. Read the spec sheet closely, because the trap this year is paying the same money for less memory. And if you can stretch the budget, treat 16GB of RAM as the baseline that keeps a machine useful for the AI-heavy software now landing on everything.
Images courtesy of NSYS Group and Harrison Broadbent on Unsplash.
