I want to tell you about a price you paid that nobody asked you about.
Not a tax. Not a tariff. Nothing you’ll find on a receipt as its own line.
But you paid it. And if you bought a laptop this year, or a phone, or a game console for a kid, you paid a lot of it.
Here’s what happened.
Inside every computer there’s a chip called memory. It’s not the brain. It’s the thing that holds what the brain is working on. Every device you own has some. It has always been cheap, and it has always gotten cheaper, year after year, for about forty years.
Three companies in the world make nearly all of it. Samsung. SK Hynix. Micron. Between them, better than ninety-five percent.
Now the artificial intelligence business came along and it needs a special kind of that same memory. A faster kind. The data centers want all of it they can get, and they’ll pay almost anything, because a machine that costs thirty thousand dollars sitting idle waiting on data is a worse problem than an expensive chip.
So the three companies did what any business would do. They pointed their factories at the customer paying more.
Same factories. Same workers. Same wafers of silicon. Just aimed somewhere else.
Every wafer that goes to a data center is a wafer that doesn’t go into a laptop.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. There’s no villain in this story and I’m not going to invent one.
But look at what came out the other side.
HP’s chief financial officer got on a call with investors this year and said memory used to be about fifteen to eighteen percent of what it costs to build one of their computers. It’s now about thirty-five percent. She said the cost roughly doubled in a single quarter.
Doubled. In three months. On a part that had gotten cheaper for forty years.
Dell raised prices. Lenovo raised prices. HP raised prices.
Sony raised the PlayStation 5 a hundred dollars in April, up to six hundred fifty, and said out loud it was memory chips. That was the second increase in under a year.
Then Microsoft raised the Xbox in August, and I want you to hear exactly what they told their own customers, because I’ve never seen a company say a thing this plainly:
Console storage and memory prices have gone up more than two and a half times. And they expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.
Two and a half times already. Double again coming.
An Xbox Series X is eight hundred dollars now.
The little one — the cheap one, the one they built so a family could get in the door — is five hundred.
Now here’s the part I keep chewing on.
The man who runs SK Hynix gave an interview to Reuters in July, on the same day his company went public in New York and raised twenty-six and a half billion dollars.
He said next year will be the worst year in the history of the memory industry from a supply standpoint. He said customer demand keeps climbing while his capacity has limits. And he said he expects demand to stay ahead of what he can make even past 2030.
Past 2030. That’s four more years, from the man who would know.
You can’t fix this fast. A new chip factory takes years to plan, years to build, and more time after that to get the yields up. Samsung’s next big one isn’t expected running until 2028.
I’ll be fair about one thing. The men warning you about a shortage are the men selling the scarce item. Scarcity is their pricing power. That doesn’t make them wrong. It’s just worth knowing whose forecast helps whom.
And I’ll be fair about the other thing too. Nobody broke a law here. Nobody met in a room. Three companies each looked at two customers and picked the one paying more. I’d have done the same. You’d have done the same.
There’s no one to be mad at. No one to write a letter to. No hearing, no vote, no notice in the mail.
A woman in Kentucky buying her grandson a laptop for school is paying more this year so a building in Texas can have the chip. She was never told. There was nobody to tell her.
I’ve been writing about artificial intelligence for a year and a half, mostly about whether the thing can be trusted and who’s accountable when it isn’t.
This is the first time I’ve been able to point at it and say: here. Here’s what it cost you. Go look at the price of a laptop.
Everybody’s arguing about whether it’s a bubble. Whether anybody will pay for what these machines produce.
Nobody’s arguing about the part that already happened.
The bill already came. It went out to everybody. And it didn’t say what it was for.
CHALLENGE: Go price the thing you were going to buy anyway — a laptop, a phone, a console — and then go find what it cost two years ago. That difference is your share. Nobody’s going to hand you an itemized bill, so make one.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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