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If you’ve shopped for a laptop, a game console, or a phone in the last few months, you’ve probably noticed the price crept up. That’s not inflation in the usual sense — it’s a global memory chip shortage that analysts have started calling “memflation,” and as of August 2026 it’s reshaping how much consumer electronics cost across the board. The obvious next question for anyone eyeing a new Apple Watch, Garmin, or Fitbit: are smartwatches next?
Here’s the mechanism behind the shortage, which devices are already feeling it, and what it actually means — and doesn’t yet mean — for wearable tech prices.
The 2026 Memory Chip Shortage, Explained
Every modern gadget with a screen and a processor needs two kinds of memory chips: DRAM (the short-term working memory) and NAND flash (long-term storage). Since late 2025, the price of both has spiked dramatically, and manufacturers across the electronics industry are passing that cost on to shoppers.
Gartner’s headline number is stark: it forecasts a combined ~130% surge in DRAM and SSD prices by the end of 2026, part of what the firm now formally tracks as “memflation.” The firm projects that surge will push average PC prices up roughly 17% and smartphone prices up roughly 13% in 2026 compared with 2025 — and that pricing relief isn’t expected until late 2027 at the earliest.
Why AI Data Centers Are Eating the World’s Memory Supply
The root cause isn’t a factory fire or a natural disaster — it’s demand. An estimated $650 billion is being poured into AI data-center buildouts by the largest US tech companies in 2026 alone, and every one of those AI servers needs enormous quantities of high-bandwidth memory. Analysts now estimate that data centers consume around 70% of world memory-chip output, leaving a shrinking slice of global DRAM and NAND supply for phones, laptops, consoles — and wearables.
IDC estimates combined DRAM and NAND supply will only grow about 16-17% in 2026, nowhere close to matching AI-driven demand growth. Chipmakers are prioritizing their most profitable customers — hyperscale data-center buyers — over consumer-electronics manufacturers who buy in smaller volumes.
How Bad Is the DRAM Price Spike, Really?
The raw numbers are dramatic. Reported DDR5 spot pricing went from roughly $6.84 in September 2025 to about $27.20 by December 2025 — close to a 300% jump in a single quarter. On the consumer side, a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that sold for under $90 in early 2025 was fetching somewhere in the $529-600 range by late 2025 into Q2 2026 — a 4-6x increase. NAND flash storage jumped roughly 55-60% in a single quarter on its own.
Those are PC-component numbers, but they explain why the pain has shown up so fast across the electronics industry — memory is a shared input into nearly everything with a chip in it.
DRAM vs NAND: A 30-Second Primer
Both terms get thrown around loosely in shortage coverage, so it’s worth being precise. DRAM is short-term working memory — the chip your device’s processor uses to run whatever app or watch face is active right now. It’s fast, it’s volatile (wiped on power-off), and every device needs at least some. NAND flash is long-term storage — where your photos, apps, and saved health data live between charges. It’s slower but persistent.
Both are made using similar manufacturing processes, and both are squeezed by the same underlying capacity problem: AI data centers need enormous amounts of DRAM to feed processors, and increasingly need high-capacity NAND for training-data storage too. That’s why you see both DRAM and NAND prices spiking together in 2026 rather than just one — it’s a shared fab capacity problem, not a single-component issue.
How This Compares to the 2021 Global Chip Shortage
If you remember the 2020-2022 chip shortage, it’s tempting to assume this is a repeat. It isn’t, structurally. That earlier shortage was triggered by pandemic factory shutdowns colliding with a surge in demand for laptops and game consoles during lockdowns — a temporary supply disruption on top of a temporary demand spike. It mostly resolved within about two years, and its main symptom for consumers was longer wait times and hard-to-find inventory rather than sustained price increases across entire product categories.
The 2026 shortage is different on both sides of the equation. On the demand side, it’s driven by a structural, multi-year AI infrastructure buildout rather than a temporary spike — data centers aren’t going to stop needing memory once a backlog clears. On the supply side, chipmakers can’t simply ramp up fab capacity quickly; building new memory fabs takes years and billions of dollars, and manufacturers are incentivized to prioritize the higher-margin data-center contracts over consumer-electronics orders even once new capacity comes online. That combination is why analysts like Gartner and SK Hynix are forecasting a shortage that runs years, not months.
What’s Already Getting More Expensive
This isn’t a hypothetical. Multiple brands have already made public moves tied directly to memory costs:
- Xiaomi/Redmi warned customers to expect 20-30% price hikes in 2026.
- Samsung’s Galaxy S26/S26+ launched $100 higher than their predecessors.
- Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, MSI, and Asus have all raised gaming-hardware prices in 2026, citing the memory shortage directly.
- Microsoft raised Surface line prices by up to $500.
- Meta raised the Quest 3 headset price by $100.
- Apple has raised prices on MacBooks and iPads, according to Fortune’s reporting from mid-2026.
- Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, and Asus have all warned of 15-20% PC price increases for 2026.
Gartner has gone as far as predicting the sub-$500 laptop segment will disappear entirely by 2028, and several manufacturers are already leaning on “shrinkflation” — quietly cutting RAM or storage specs at the same price point rather than raising the sticker price outright.
Do Smartwatches Even Use Enough Memory to Be Affected?
This is the part worth being precise about. As of this article’s publish date, no major wearable brand — not Apple, Samsung, Garmin, Fitbit, Whoop, or Oura — has announced a memory-shortage-driven price increase on any smartwatch, fitness tracker, or smart ring. That’s a real and meaningful difference from phones, PCs, consoles, and headsets, where price hikes are already documented and public.
Part of the reason is architectural: a smartwatch simply doesn’t need much memory. Where a flagship phone might carry 8-12GB of RAM and 256GB+ of storage, a typical smartwatch runs on a few hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes of DRAM and a handful of gigabytes of flash — small enough that even a steep per-chip price increase adds only a modest amount to the bill of materials.
That said, “hasn’t happened yet” isn’t the same as “can’t happen.” A few pathways could still let the shortage reach your wrist:
- Shared suppliers. The same memory manufacturers (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Kioxia) sell chips into phones, laptops, and wearables alike. If a supplier is squeezed on capacity, smaller wearable orders can get deprioritized or repriced.
- R&D and component costs amortized across a whole product line. A company like Apple or Samsung doesn’t price the Watch or the Galaxy Watch in isolation — corporate-level cost pressure from its phone and laptop lines can bleed into other product pricing decisions.
- Holiday-season component sourcing. Q4 is when most wearable brands lock in components for the following year’s models. If memory prices stay elevated into late 2026, that’s exactly when it would show up in 2027 wearable pricing.
What to Watch For Going Forward
If wearable prices do start moving, the more likely first sign won’t be a sticker-price jump — it’ll be quieter. Watch for:
- Entry-level models being discontinued rather than repriced (see our breakdown on budget smartwatches at risk in 2026 for more on this pattern)
- Storage specs staying flat generation over generation instead of increasing, even as competitors’ software demands more
- Bundling changes — memberships or accessories getting folded into the box price rather than the hardware price rising outright
If you’re weighing whether to buy now or hold off, we go deeper on the timeline question in should you buy a smartwatch now or wait.
Where to Look Next
For the Apple-Watch-and-fitness-tracker-specific version of this question, read our companion piece on whether the RAM shortage will make Apple Watch and fitness trackers more expensive. If you’re shopping today, our best fitness trackers for 2026 roundup and our list of 9 powerful latest smartwatches for 2026 are both good starting points before pricing potentially shifts further.
The Bottom Line
The 2026 memory chip shortage is real, severe, and already visible in phone, PC, console, and headset prices. Smartwatches haven’t been hit yet, and their lower memory footprint gives them some natural insulation — but the underlying supply/demand imbalance is expected to persist through 2027, and possibly much longer. If you’ve been eyeing an upgrade and current-gen pricing looks reasonable, there’s a reasonable argument for not waiting on the assumption that wearables will stay untouched forever. You can compare current smartwatch deals on Amazon before any potential increases work their way down to wrist-worn devices, and check our Apple Watch alternatives guide if you’re weighing options across brands.