As RAM and storage continue to see price increases due to the growth of AI, Intel warns that CPU prices will follow suit.
The entire tech industry is bracing for what some publications are dubbing ‘RAMmageddon’, as memory is becoming increasingly scarce and exponentially more expensive, due to AI data centres buying large quantities of stock.
Analysts and tech companies are both predicting that the situation could have drastic effects for the entire tech industry, with companies such as Apple and Tesla warning that production will be constrained in the future.
Storage prices have also been increasing as a result of the demand, and now in Intel has stated that the price of CPUs is likely to rise too.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, Intel explained during its latest earnings call that as AI data centres shift their focus from training to inference, the need for CPUs will increase.
The training phase is where machine learning models are shown a vast amount of data, building up its ‘knowledge’ base. This phase requires significant amounts of GPU power because of the parallel processing required.
However, the inference phase – where the AI then takes what it’s learned and uses it to provide new information based on user prompts – relies more on CPU, especially during ‘agentic’ AI, where human interaction is minimal and the AI acts independently to perform multiple steps to reach a solution.
According to Intel, AI servers have generally needed one CPU for every four to eight GPUs used in an AI server, but with agentic AI this is beginning to shit to one CPU per GPU, meaning more CPUs are required.
“As you think about the growth rate now going forward, [CPU demand is] going to become a significant part of the AI [total addressable market]”, Intel CFO David Zinsner reportedly said on the call.
The report notes that server CPU prices have already risen by as much as 20% since March, and consumer CPUs have risen 5-10% over the same period, with analysts expecting another 8-10% increase in the second half of 2026.
The increase in RAM and storage cost has contributed to the numerous console price increases this generation, at a time when companies would traditionally be looking to lower prices instead.
It could also have repercussions for the price and release date of the next generation of consoles. A report from Bloomberg in February cited sources who claimed that Sony may be holding back PlayStation 6 until 2028 or 2029 in case the issue isn’t resolved until then.
