SAN JOSE, California — Memory and storage prices climbed to their highest levels in years on Thursday as chipmakers including Micron and Samsung diverted production capacity toward artificial intelligence data centres. Buyers of consumer PCs and enterprise servers faced steep cost increases.

The price surge has spread beyond premium solid-state drives to conventional hard disk drives, which manufacturers had marketed as a cheaper alternative. Market researchers TrendForce and Counterpoint reported that contract prices for DRAM and NAND flash rose by double-digit percentages through the third quarter of 2026, driven by AI infrastructure orders.

Much of the demand stems from high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators, which has drawn wafer capacity away from standard chips. Micron said in recent guidance that it had committed a growing share of output to HBM contracts, while Samsung and SK Hynix have reported similar allocation shifts. The result has been tightening supply across the broader memory market.

Computer makers warned the increases would reach consumers. Executives at several PC vendors said rising component costs would push up prices for laptops and prebuilt desktops heading into the year-end shopping season, reversing years of falling storage costs per gigabyte.

Analysts at TrendForce and Counterpoint Research said the shortage was unlikely to ease before new fabrication capacity comes online in 2027, leaving the market dependent on AI demand that shows no sign of slowing.