The super boom cycle of storage chips continues, with a wave of price increases sweeping across the entire consumer electronics industry chain.

“I used to be considered an aggressive player in memory price prediction, but in reality, my judgment was even more aggressive than before.” On March 24th, during Xiaomi’s earnings call, Xiaomi President Lu Weibing stated that the speed and intensity of memory price increases exceeded expectations, affecting not only the smartphone industry but potentially all consumer electronics sectors.

Due to the surge in storage chip prices, the consumer electronics industry is experiencing a rare “price hike wave.” Following smartphone manufacturers like OPPO and vivo announcing price increases, PC giant ASUS also warned that device prices would rise significantly in the second quarter. The pressure from storage costs is spreading from smartphones and PCs to cloud services and other fields.

Fitch Ratings Asia-Pacific Corporate Rating Director Zhang Huiyuan told reporters, “The prices of storage chips will remain firm from 2026 to 2027. Gradual capacity increases can help the industry avoid severe shortages, but cannot fully resolve supply issues.”

● Staff Reporter Wang Jinghan

Consumer electronics products continue to raise prices

According to reports, on March 23rd, ASUS warned that PC prices would increase by 25% to 30% in the second quarter, and the upward trend is likely to continue in the second half of the year.

Liao Yixiang, General Manager of ASUS’s System Business, said that due to extreme shortages of memory (DRAM) and solid-state drives (SSD), the price hikes are no longer measured in percentages but in multiples: “This is the reality faced by the entire market and all brands.”

Intel also plans to comprehensively raise the prices of its PC CPU products, with an expected increase of about 10%.

Research reports from Huafu Securities noted that in the first quarter of 2026, storage chip prices surged, with 64GB DDR5 RDIMM server modules rising 150% month-over-month, 12GB LPDDR5X mobile chips up 130%, and previous-generation 8GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs soaring 180%.

Several mobile phone manufacturers have also announced price increases.

On March 24th, Xiaomi Group leader Lu Weibing said during the earnings presentation that a price increase is not ruled out. He also mentioned that Xiaomi’s “full ecosystem of people, vehicles, and homes” development helps offset some of the impact of memory price hikes.

He admitted that memory price increases are indeed a huge challenge for smartphone manufacturers. Simply put, the impact is greater on lower-end devices and smaller on higher-end ones because memory’s proportion of the overall phone BOM cost varies. Lu Weibing believes that Xiaomi’s high-end strategy has progressed smoothly in recent years, so compared to competitors, Xiaomi might be in a better position to handle price hikes. He also stated that the storage price increase cycle will eventually end, and many categories will have opportunities for industry restructuring. Difficult external environments will inevitably push for innovation, which is also an opportunity for product and industry innovation.

Earlier, on March 10th, OPPO was the first to announce price adjustments for some products. On March 16th, vivo issued a price adjustment notice, and from March 18th, adjusted the suggested retail prices of some vivo and iQOO products.

Although Honor has not announced a price increase, its new generation foldable flagship phone Magic V6, released this month, is priced about 10% higher than the previous model, and some models in stores have also increased in price.

Honor CEO Li Jian said that the current AI-driven memory shortage cycle is expected to last 2-3 years, and manufacturers need to improve technology and cost control to navigate the industry cycle.

Xiaomi Group Chairman and CEO Lei Jun previously admitted in an interview that memory price hikes have put enormous cost pressure on all terminal manufacturers in the industry. Lei Jun also said that, as a standardized product, memory pricing has global and cross-industry characteristics, and Xiaomi will try to offset these costs by internally improving efficiency.

Research from Huaxin Securities suggests that, from an industry impact perspective, consumer electronics sales will face temporary pressure, and industry resources and pricing power may further concentrate among leading brands with scale and supply chain advantages. Meanwhile, with semiconductor prices generally rising, products heavily reliant on semiconductors—such as home appliances and automobiles—are also facing price increase pressures.

Storage chip capacity shifting toward servers

The current surge in consumer electronics prices driven by storage chips mainly stems from global tech giants heavily investing in AI computing infrastructure, creating a “siphon effect” on consumer-grade storage chips.

Industry insiders say that on the supply side, memory chip manufacturers find higher profits in selling high-end chips to AI data centers than to PC and smartphone companies. Currently, manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are focusing more on high-margin products, with capacity utilization near full. On the demand side, as global tech giants announce increased investments in AI computing centers, the rigid and structural demand for high-performance NAND and DRAM has surged, tightening chip supply for consumer electronics.

By the end of 2025, Micron Technology announced it would cease its Crucial and Ballistix consumer brands to better support large strategic customers in fast-growing fields like AI.

TrendForce’s industry survey data shows that in the first quarter of 2026, the demand from AI and data centers will continue to exacerbate the global memory supply-demand imbalance, with vendors’ bargaining power increasing.

The explosive growth in AI demand and the rise of intelligent agents have also led to a price hike wave in cloud computing. As AI large models move from chat dialogues to multi-step execution applications, token usage has surged, and inference computing power demand has grown exponentially.

On March 18th, Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Intelligent Cloud announced price increases for core products like AI computing and storage.

Alibaba Cloud stated that the prices of computing cards like the Pengcheng Zhenwu 810E increased by 5%-34%, and its file storage product CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition) rose by 30%. Baidu Intelligent Cloud said that prices for AI computing-related services increased by about 5%-30%, and parallel file storage prices rose by about 30%.

Long-term growth of AI demand

Industry consensus holds that storage chip prices will remain firm from 2026 to 2027.

CITIC Securities research reports indicate that driven by AI demand, storage is expected to remain in a super-boom cycle, with supply shortages lasting at least until 2027.

Huafu Securities reports that this round of memory shortages may last until 2027. Although major DRAM manufacturers expect production to increase by about 26% in 2026 and NAND by about 24%, substantial supply expansion, including domestic storage companies, still requires time.

Zhang Huiyuan of Fitch Ratings Asia-Pacific also told reporters that due to risks like Samsung Electronics’ strike risks, controlled capacity expansion, and challenges in migrating to advanced processes, the storage chip market remains tight. Fitch’s judgment is that “storage chip prices will stay firm from 2026 to 2027, and gradual capacity increases will prevent severe shortages, but cannot fully resolve supply issues.”

On a macro level, computing infrastructure and AI applications will also lead long-term economic development.

Liu Liehong, Director of the National Data Bureau, mentioned in an article that at the beginning of 2024, China’s daily token call volume was 100 billion; by the end of 2025, it surged to 100 trillion; in March this year, it exceeded 140 trillion, a growth of over a thousand times in two years. Since the end of January this year, some model companies have set records with 20-day revenues surpassing their total 2025 annual income. Behind these figures, a new business logic based on token billing is accelerating its evolution.