In February 2026, Micron announced it would wind down its consumer memory business. The only American member of the global memory triopoly was telling smaller buyers, in primo corporate speak, that they would no longer be a priority. Micron’s larger strategic customers—namely the hyperscalers building AI data centers—took precedence.
That decision is a small piece of a much larger reallocation of industrial capacity that is about to hit American households hard. Preeminent corporate research firm Gartner expects combined dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and solid state drive (SSD) prices to rise 130 percent by the end of 2026, pushing PC prices up 17 percent and smartphone prices up 13 percent compared with 2025. It projects PC shipments to fall 10.4 percent and smartphone shipments to drop 8.4 percent in 2026. In spite of the fact that Apple just entered the game with the Mac Neo, Gartner warns that the sub-$500 PC could disappear by 2028.
These are kitchen-table numbers in an era obsessed with data centers. More importantly, they are arriving on a timeline that the current chip strategy was not built to meet.
