Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Dell have all raised prices collectively! Entry-level products have seen increases of up to 60%.

According to CCTV Finance, the surge in AI computing power demand has driven memory chip prices significantly higher, shrinking supply for consumer storage products and pushing upstream price pressures downstream to end users.

Recently, US tech giant Amazon has raised prices on multiple hardware products, including its smart speakers and e-readers, to cope with the operational pressure from sharply rising costs.

The price adjustment covers several best-selling hardware products aimed at ordinary consumers. Among them, the entry-level Echo series smart speaker, the highest-selling model, saw the largest increase, rising from $49.99 to $79.99, approximately RMB 538, a jump of about 60%.

The 16GB base version of the e-reader rose from $109.99 to $149.99, roughly RMB 1,000, an increase of about 36%.

Amazon stated that the consumer electronics industry is broadly facing price pressures from memory and storage components. The company has tried to absorb costs internally as much as possible, but now has to adjust pricing across its product lines.

Industry analysis indicates that AI servers are aggressively snapping up high-bandwidth memory, tilting storage capacity toward computing power, which squeezes chip supply for consumer electronics like smartphones, PCs, and smart home devices.

Research firm Counterpoint estimates that DRAM prices surged 80%-90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026.

Before Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Dell had already taken action, including directly raising prices or reducing standard memory configurations on shipped devices.

Another research firm, IDC, warns that the global memory shortage could persist until 2027, with industry forecasts suggesting storage chip prices will likely peak in 2028 before gradually stabilizing. This round of storage price increases has already spread from data centers to all categories of consumer electronics.