{"id":217103,"date":"2026-02-23T13:37:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T18:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/23\/phones-might-get-pricier-next-year-thank-the-ai-boom\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T20:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T01:20:10","slug":"phones-might-get-pricier-next-year-thank-the-ai-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/23\/phones-might-get-pricier-next-year-thank-the-ai-boom\/","title":{"rendered":"Phones might get pricier next year. Thank the AI boom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/phones-might-pricier-next-thank-100100448.html\">Phones might get pricier next year. Thank the AI boom<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/phones-might-pricier-next-thank-100100448.html\">https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/phones-might-pricier-next-thank-100100448.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-02-23 13:37:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.aol.com\">www.aol.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Smartphones may soon become more expensive due to rising memory prices. &#8211; SeongJoon Cho\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<p>Fancy cameras, giant screens and massive storage usually make smartphones more expensive. But next year, it\u2019s a routine component that might be boosting prices: memory.<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s not just phones. Any device that uses memory, from phones to tablets and smartwatches, could get pricier.<\/p>\n<p>Memory prices are rising for consumer products because major manufacturers are instead ramping up production for AI data centers as artificial intelligence companies boom.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s pretty much brutal and crunched across the board,\u201d said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.<\/p>\n<p>The International Data Corporation, a global market research firm, reported earlier this week that the smartphone market is expected to decline by 0.9% in 2026 in part because of memory shortages. Memory prices are expected to surge by 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and may climb an additional 20% early next year, Counterpoint Research said last month.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"heading\">A boom in data center demand<\/h3>\n<p>Tech companies like Meta, Microsoft and Google have aggressively expanded their data centers and infrastructure this year to keep up with AI demand. And that growth is expected to continue: A report from McKinsey &#038; Company indicates companies will invest nearly $7 trillion in data center infrastructure-related costs globally by 2030.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s prompted memory manufacturers like Micron and Samsung to shift their focus to data centers, which use a different type of memory than computers and smartphones. As a result, there are fewer resources for consumer products, said Wang.<\/p>\n<p>Memory and storage company Micron announced on Wednesday that it\u2019s exiting the consumer memory business, citing a \u201csurge in demand\u201d coming from \u201cAI-driven growth\u201d in data centers.<\/p>\n<p>Jaejune Kim, executive vice president for memory at Samsung, said in October that the company saw strong demand for memory for AI and data centers in the&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/phones-might-pricier-next-thank-100100448.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Phones might get pricier next year. Thank the AI boom https:\/\/www.aol.com\/articles\/phones-might-pricier-next-thank-100100448.html Publish Date: 2026-02-23 13:37:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":217104,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/en\/aol_cnn_business_articles_764\/c89b83cee2edf4f68807eac306895a3f","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-217103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217103"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217105,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217103\/revisions\/217105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}