Your next phone will cost more or do less. Which one depends on your budget?

A gigabyte of RAM cost $2.80 in 2025. It costs $12 now. That fivefold jump, tracked by Morgan Stanley, is not a niche component story. It is already inside the price tag or the spec sheet of nearly every phone and laptop launching this year, and almost nobody selling you one is explaining why.

AI data centers need enormous volumes of high-bandwidth memory to train and run large models. Chipmakers, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron chief among them, have been reallocating factory capacity away from ordinary phone and laptop grade DRAM to build it. Less supply for consumer devices, chasing the same or growing demand, does what shortages always do to price.

TrendForce reports DRAM prices rose more than 90% quarter on quarter in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with another 50 to 60% stacked on top in the second quarter. Samsung was reportedly pushing for a further 20% increase heading into the third quarter, above the wider market's already steep 13 to 18% forecast. IDC's Francisco Jeronimo described the effect spreading through consumer electronics as a tsunami-like shock. Higher prices are expected to persist until at least 2028.

The shortage is not hitting every device the same way, and that split is the real story. At the top of the market, Google's Pixel 11, which launched this week, kept its charging speed and battery capacity essentially flat against a field that has moved on, and early leaks about a RAM downgrade on the base model, later only partly walked back, trace straight back to component cost pressure. Samsung's Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus launched roughly $100 more expensive than their predecessors, publicly framed as a storage upgrade, minimum capacity doubled from 128GB to 256GB, while Samsung's own disclosures point to a 16% jump in mobile RAM costs behind that reframing.

Samsung's position here deserves its own scrutiny. Its semiconductor division posted record sales this year on the back of the exact scarcity its smartphone division is now billing customers for. It is the same company getting paid twice on the same shortage, once as the seller of the scarce chip, once as the maker of a phone that costs more because the chip is scarce.

Flagship buyers feel this as an annoying price bump they can mostly absorb. Below $300, the damage is structural, not cosmetic. Manufacturers are increasingly holding the sticker price steady and quietly cutting the spec instead, 3GB of RAM where a device shipped 6GB a year ago, 64GB of storage instead of 128GB, sometimes exiting that price tier of the market altogether rather than sell at a loss.

That tier is the phone most Kenyans and most East Africans actually buy, and it is the same tier Kenya's own import licensing and warranty rules have been squeezing from the regulatory side this year. A global chip shortage and a local compliance fee have nothing to do with each other, yet they land on the same shelf: the cheapest phone in the shop gets harder to find, worse specified, or both, while the sticker price barely moves.