For years we have accepted that mobile phones were rising in price in exchange for better cameras, better screens, faster processors and, so to speak, increasingly refined designs. We have also begun to assume that on-device AI does not come free: it usually requires more power, more storage and more memory. The surprise is that one of the next blows may come precisely from there, from mobile RAM, a component that usually goes unnoticed, but is very present in the real cost of each smartphone that hits the market.
The clearest signal comes from the LPDDR5X, one of the most relevant mobile memories on the current market and which was already coming from an unusual movement. According to TrendForce data, this type of memory registered a quarter-on-quarter increase of between 58% and 63% in the first quarter of 2026. This is the largest quarterly increase in its history. What is striking is that this jump does not seem to have closed the cycle: the forecast for the second quarter points to an even more intense rise.
If we focus on the forecast for the second quarter, the scale of the problem changes. A projection attributed to TrendForce, shared by Jukan Choi, suggests that mobile DRAM contract prices will grow between 93% and 98% in quarter-on-quarter terms during that period. In other words: we are not talking about one more increase in a stressed market, but rather a jump close to doubling the price in just three months. For the smartphone industry, a figure like this is not background noise.
It should be noted that TrendForce works with paid reports aimed primarily at institutional investors, analysts and companies in the sector, so the full document is not openly available. The relevant part for this article has emerged through Choi, a semiconductor analyst at Citrini Research. The expert has more than 100,000 followers on X and his comments have been cited by media such as The Economist, which included them in an article on the impact of AI on consumer electronics.
The impact on the price of RAM in mobile phones
Here we are not talking about the price that a user sees when looking for memory in a store. Mobile DRAM is negotiated in another field: that of contracts between memory manufacturers, such as Samsung, SK Hynix about Micronand large customers who buy enormous volumes to integrate these chips into their products. This world is made up of mobile brands, server manufacturers and other OEMs. That is why the data matters: it does not describe a specific purchase, but rather the base cost with which the industry begins to manufacture its next devices.
The rise doesn’t appear out of nowhere either. SemiAnalysis noted in early April 2026 that DRAM prices could more than double this year and record another double-digit increase in 2027. The same firm noted that the contract price of LPDDR5 had risen more than 3 times since the first quarter of 2025, and that it was likely to exceed $10/GB on the open market during the first quarter of 2026. That is, the second quarter does not open tension: it accelerates it.
DRAM prices could more than double this year and see another double-digit increase in 2027.
The backdrop is AI. HBM memory, key to powering the GPUs that support many artificial intelligence data centers, remains in a situation of structural shortage and absorbs a good part of the sector’s investment. The consequence is easy to understand: if a good part of the money, productive capacity and attention of manufacturers is directed to that high-bandwidth memory, there is less margin to alleviate strain on other DRAM families. Among them is mobile memory, which now competes in a much more demanding supply chain.
Added to this is another important detail: smartphone-class memory no longer lives only within the smartphone. NVIDIA uses LPDDR5X in its Grace and Vera processors, designed for AI-linked server systems. The reading for the mobile market is clear: a technology used in phones and compact devices is also part of architectures that compete for resources at the center of the race for artificial intelligence.
The difference with the PC world helps to understand it better. If we build a computer, we can choose how much RAM to buy, look for an offer and install the module ourselves. It doesn’t work like that with cell phones: we buy a complete device, with the memory already integrated and no real margin to intervene later. That makes the rise of the LPDDR not seen directlybut it doesn’t mean it disappears. It is incorporated into the cost of manufacturing the phone and, from there, it can end up influencing the price we pay.
Counterpoint helps turn that increase into a figure that is much easier to visualize. For a high-end configuration, with 16 GB of LPDDR5X HKMG and 512 GB of UFS 4.1 storage, the firm projected an increase in the BOM of between $100 and $150 for the second quarter of 2026. We are talking about the cost of materials, not the sales price, so it is not advisable to mechanically transfer that figure to the consumer. Even so, it is a sign that does not go unnoticed.
The bad news, therefore, is not that all mobile phones are going to increase in price automatically or in the same proportion. That will depend on each manufacturer.their contracts, their margins and how they configure each range. But the factor is there: if mobile memory becomes more expensive with this force, the cost of manufacturing a smartphone inevitably changes. And in a market that was already getting us used to increasingly demanding prices, RAM is emerging as another obstacle for those who expected a price drop in the short term.
Images | PR MEDIA | Samsung
In | Apple had been able to maintain prices despite the crazy rise in RAM. That’s over
