The global artificial intelligence boom has hijacked component supply chains, driving up laptop and SSD prices in India by stripping away essential memory hardware.
BENGALURU, June 29 — Contract prices for essential DRAM and NAND flash memory skyrocketed by 90 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Indian consumers looking to buy a new MacBook, Windows laptop, or basic solid-state drive are walking into a massive global hardware crisis. Industry analysts at Lenovo project consumer laptop prices will surge by up to 35 per cent this year. You can’t blame standard inflation for this massive spike.
Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services aren’t holding back. They’re aggressively building massive AI data centres, which require roughly eight to ten times more storage and high-bandwidth memory than traditional infrastructure.
Who actually wins when they’re buying up the entire global supply chain?
They’ve signed massive, long-term procurement contracts and paid top dollar to secure this hardware. So, top-tier memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron immediately pivoted. They’ve shifted their factory production lines away from low-margin consumer laptop parts to focus heavily on these highly lucrative enterprise AI chips. This aggressive pivot created a severe, structural shortage of consumer-grade DDR RAM and SSD controllers worldwide.
The cheap SSDs of 2024 aren’t coming back.
But Indian buyers face an even steeper climb than Western consumers. The Indian Rupee’s recent volatility against the US Dollar acts as a brutal multiplier. Because manufacturers price global components in dollars, PC brands like Apple, Dell, and Asus must hike their retail price tags in rupees just to maintain their base profit margins. And it doesn’t stop there. India imports the vast majority of these laptops and storage drives as finished or semi-finished goods. When the base global cost of a memory chip doubles, the proportional import duties and Goods and Services Tax calculated on that hardware instantly jump.
Don’t expect the market to correct itself anytime soon. Lenovo recently warned investors that the memory market has fundamentally changed, forecasting the capacity squeeze to persist through late 2026 and deep into 2027. Supply chain analysts suggest retail prices won’t normalise until closer to 2030, once the massive AI infrastructure build-out finally stabilises. Until then, you’ll simply pay the AI tax.
