CES 2026 proved the PC industry is hosed this year

Dell’s XPS 14 now costs over $2,000. An AMD executive predicts that PC makers will likely make piecemeal upgrades this year, instead of building entirely new systems. And new AI supercomputers from NVIDIA and AMD are gobbling up the RAM market. At CES 2026, it was hard not to notice the disastrous year ahead for the IT industry, one that will likely lead to higher prices and more limited availability of consumer goods across the board.

In fact, the show just confirmed what has been evident since RAM prices have skyrocketed over the past few months, driven by demand from AI data centers. As Samsung marketing chief Wonjin Lee told Bloomberg at CES: “There are going to be issues around semiconductor supply, and it’s going to affect everyone. Prices are rising as we speak. »

Dell’s new XPS 14 and XPS 16 are among the first systems affected by these requests. Last year’s models started at $1,699 and $1,899, respectively, and we were initially told the new models would actually be cheaper, at $1,650 and $1,850. But Dell later announced a shocking price hike: the XPS 14 now starts at $2,050, while the XPS 16 costs $2,200.

While it didn’t take much to get the previous models priced over $2,000, I find it really crazy that the entry-level models already start there. And meanwhile, Apple still hasn’t changed its $1,599 price for the 14-inch MacBook Pro. At least Dell is still cheaper than the 16-inch MacBook Pro at $2,499.

Regarding desktops, AMD’s David McAfee, corporate vice president and general manager of Client Channel Business, noted that the longevity of the company’s AM4 and AM5 platforms could be a boon for gamers, as they can upgrade their processors without purchasing new RAM kits and motherboards. This allows you to access better performance without paying the price of overly expensive RAM.

“I think this will potentially be a trend that we see in 2026 with more component upgrades, as opposed to complete system swaps and total rebuilds,” he said in a group interview with Engadget and other outlets. “Some of the most popular CPUs that are still running in gaming rigs are things like the 2600 from the Pinnacle Ridge era, or the 3000 series… Even moving from there to somewhat more modern 5000 series CPUs in an AM4 socket and motherboard, there’s a big boost there.”

McAfee added that about 30% to 40% of AMD’s business still revolves around the AM4 platform, even without the specter of a wildcat memory market.

“No product containing memory is immune to some of these forces around the price of DRAM and its effects on the market,” he said, when asked about potential GPU price increases. “I think the truth is that the volatility that we’ve seen over the last couple of months is truly unprecedented.”

Looking ahead, he said he expects prices to stabilize over the first three to six months of the year, but he didn’t explain his reasoning further. As an aside, he also noted that AMD’s X3D chips, which feature 3D V-cache, don’t actually see much impact with slower RAM. Their high amounts of onboard L2 and L3 cache compensate for less ideal memory transfer speeds, McAfee said.

It’s worth noting that McAfee has commented on the state of RAM. Every PC maker I interviewed, including Dell and Acer, declined to comment on the unstable state of the memory industry ahead of CES. Perhaps they were hoping things would calm down before they had to price their new systems. Ultimately, they are beholden to an increasingly limited amount of RAM.

And where does all this memory go? At CES, NVIDIA announced its new Vera Rubin AI supercomputer, which supports up to 54 TB of RAM on 36 Vera CPUs and 20.7 TB of memory on 72 GPUs. AMD also announced its new Helios AI rack, which supports up to 31TB of memory on 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs. Given the endless appetite for computing to power the creation and inference of AI models, there will likely be significant demand for these beastly systems.

Simply put: our global memory supply is being sacrificed to appease the AI ​​industry. This is good news for OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, but bad news for everyone who cares about the PCs and consumer products we use every day. Prepare for a year of rising prices.