Order Now or Pay More, HP Warns PC Buyers Facing Memory Crunch

HP Advises Buying PCs Now as Memory Costs Reach 35 Percent of Build Price.

David McQuarrie, chief commercial officer at HP, has told buyers not to wait. In an interview published by Le Figaro on 21 August 2026, he advised every customer who needs a computer before January 2028 to order it now, because prices will only go up from here. Coming from the executive who runs commercial operations at the world's second largest PC maker, the message confirms that the memory component crisis nicknamed RAMageddon is far from over. McQuarrie described the situation as something the industry has not seen in decades, noting that earlier supply shortages existed but none reached this scale and none looked likely to last as long.

The crisis began in the closing weeks of 2025, when memory makers started redirecting wafer capacity toward high bandwidth memory and server DRAM for artificial intelligence data centers. That reallocation is the heart of the problem. Building high bandwidth memory consumes roughly three to four times the wafer capacity needed for standard DDR5, so every gigabyte routed to an AI accelerator removes several gigabytes from the pool available for laptops, desktops and phones. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron all shifted production lines toward the higher margin AI segment, and hyperscale cloud operators locked in multi year supply agreements that removed even more capacity from the open market.

The price record speaks for itself. Contract DRAM prices climbed roughly 172 percent across 2025. They then jumped between 90 and 95 percent quarter over quarter in the first three months of 2026, followed by another 58 to 63 percent in the second quarter. TrendForce now expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise a further 13 to 18 percent in the third quarter of 2026, with NAND flash up 10 to 15 percent. A slower rate of increase is not the same thing as relief, because each rise compounds on the last. The mainstream DDR4 1Gx8 3200 chip reached a record 42.45 dollars on 7 August 2026, more than double its May level. In a market snapshot taken on 14 August 2026, a mainstream 32GB DDR5 kit was selling for between 380 and 589 dollars, several times its 2025 price.

PC manufacturers absorbed the first wave and are now passing it through. HP disclosed that memory rose from between 15 and 18 percent of a PC bill of materials to about 35 percent within a single quarter. Dell raised server prices on 10 December 2025 and repriced tens of thousands of open PC quotes in January 2026, with chief operating officer Jeff Clarke saying the company had compressed discounting and shortened quote validity to the tightest window in its history. Lenovo cancelled all outstanding customer quotations as of 1 January 2026 and issued a second round of warnings in March. Across the industry, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus have all confirmed increases in the range of 15 to 20 percent, and some analysts put the eventual pass through closer to 30 percent.

HP has held up better than expected so far. In its second fiscal quarter results, released on 27 May 2026, the company reported revenue of 14.4 billion dollars, up 9 percent year on year, with the Personal Systems division growing 13 percent to 10.2 billion dollars. Non GAAP earnings per share came in at 0.86 dollars, well above guidance, and HP set its full year outlook at 2.90 to 3.10 dollars. The cushion came from long term supply agreements, a stock of lower cost memory bought before the spike, product reconfigurations and disciplined repricing. That cushion is running out. HP has told investors it expects Personal Systems operating margins to bottom in the fourth fiscal quarter as the cheaper inventory is consumed, with recovery only from fiscal 2027 onward. Third quarter results are due at the end of August 2026 and will be the first real test of how much of the cost the company can still absorb.

The demand side is already buckling. TrendForce cut its 2026 global notebook shipment forecast to a decline of 13.6 percent, a reversal from the modest growth it projected before the shortage took hold. Gartner has estimated that DRAM and solid state drive costs will climb 130 percent by the end of 2026, adding around 17 percent to average PC sticker prices. IDC expects PC shipments to fall as buyers delay purchases. The effect is uneven. Budget and mid range machines are being pulled from catalogues or shipped with less memory, while Dell and HP tilt their line ups toward premium and AI capable models that can carry the extra cost. Entry level computing is becoming harder to find, which weighs most on schools, small businesses and price sensitive households.

The knock on effects reach well beyond laptops. Gaming hardware prices have risen repeatedly since January 2026, smartphone makers are trimming memory configurations on mid range handsets, and graphics card supply has tightened because video memory competes for the same production lines. Enterprise buyers face longer lead times and quotes that expire within days rather than weeks.

Relief is not close. TrendForce says meaningful new capacity is unlikely before late 2027 or 2028, and Micron's own additions are not expected to ship in volume until the third quarter of 2028 at the earliest. Micron expects supply and demand to stay tight beyond calendar 2026, and the chairman of SK Group has suggested the imbalance could persist toward 2030. There is a dissenting view. A former head of Samsung's chip division argued in May 2026 that an aggressive expansion of Chinese DRAM output could break the price spiral within a year, and PC makers including HP, Dell, Acer and Asus have begun qualifying modules from Chinese suppliers such as CXMT. Validation and integration take time, so any easing from that direction would arrive in 2027 rather than this year.

For procurement teams, the practical guidance now converging across the industry is straightforward. Order early, accept that quotes may not survive to delivery, extend refresh cycles where the hardware still performs, and treat memory upgrades and repairs as a serious alternative to full replacement. HP's advice to buy before January 2028 is aggressive, but nothing in the current supply picture contradicts it.