According to the latest "Memory Price Tracking Report" released by Counterpoint Research in February 2026, driven by the surge in high-profit demand in the field of artificial intelligence servers, the prices of DRAM and NAND memory for consumer applications have soared by more than 600% in the past year.
The gains spread across a wide range of consumer electronics products, from personal computers and low-end smartphones to routers and set-top boxes. The report predicts that memory prices will continue to rise until June 2026. Even if costs may peak in the first half of 2026, supply constraints will continue to exist.
In this round of skyrocketing memory prices, broadband products such as routers, gateways, and set-top boxes have been hardest hit. In the past nine months, the price of smartphone memory has increased threefold, but the price of broadband products based on "consumer-grade memory" has soared nearly sevenfold. Routers are the most severely affected category, especially original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with unstable supply chains and weak bargaining power. According to data from Counterpoint's teardown and bill of materials analysis service, memory costs now account for more than 20% of the total bill of materials (BOM) of mid- to low-end routers, compared with only about 3% a year ago.
This "memory winter" has sounded the alarm for telecom operators who plan to vigorously promote broadband deployment (fiber or fixed wireless access) in 2026. Supply shortages will become a critical issue, prolonging and slowing down deployment schedules in addition to increasing procurement costs for routers, customer premise equipment (CPE) and set-top boxes. Many leading telecom operators originally planned to launch AI smart client devices for fixed or wireless broadband, which require higher configuration computing and memory semiconductor components, but these plans may now face significant resistance.
Although the difficulties encountered by the PC and low-end smartphone industries in terms of "mobile memory" are well known, monthly trends since last year indicate that other consumer products such as routers have been more severely affected. As the demand for high-margin memory products in the field of artificial intelligence servers continues to surge, the consumer market of traditional DRAM and NAND is facing the dual pressure of tight supply and soaring prices.
It will become critical for telecom operators to closely monitor memory price dynamics, identify which equipment manufacturers have secured sufficient supply, and track the latest changes in bill of materials costs and pricing trends. Counterpoint's "Memory Price Tracking Report" tracks major memory products by category, including mobile, PC, server, consumer and automotive, providing an important reference for the industry.