The global scramble for AI computing power has spilled into the shopping aisle. A memory chip shortage — nicknamed "RAMaggedon" — is pushing up prices on everyday consumer electronics, from game consoles to laptops to graphics cards.
The clearest example is Microsoft's Xbox. According to the BBC, the Xbox Series X has been hit with a £170 price increase in the UK, with one model rising by 43%, a move attributed to rising memory chip costs. That is not a modest adjustment at the margins; it is the kind of jump that changes whether a console is a plausible purchase at all.
Apple is feeling it too. Outlook Business reports that the MacBook Air is facing supply constraints as the memory shortage spreads to what it describes as the company's most popular laptop — a sign the squeeze is reaching high-volume mainstream products, not just niche hardware.
PC builders have their own version of the problem. Tom's Hardware, surveying current-generation Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, points to AI demand, tariffs and what it bluntly calls greed as the pressures keeping GPU prices elevated, and asks whether a genuinely cheap GPU is still available at all.
The common thread, as Euronews frames it, is that AI demand is keeping consumer prices high in the chip crunch. Memory is a finite, shared resource: the same components that go into a laptop or a console are being bought in enormous quantities to feed AI data centres. When the biggest buyers in the market pay more and take more, everyone else waits longer and pays more.
It matters because the cost of the AI boom is no longer confined to tech company balance sheets — it is showing up in the price of the ordinary devices people actually buy.