Overview
- Acer chairman Jason Chen said on Sunday that average PC component prices will keep rising through late 2026 and are likely to peak around mid‑2027 before easing in the second half of 2027.
- Chen warned that component costs could climb 5–20 percent in Q4 2026 as memory and SSD prices stay elevated and some lower‑end CPUs remain constrained.
- Manufacturers have shifted much production toward high‑bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators, which has cut supply for consumer DDR4/DDR5 and higher‑end GPUs and pushed up retail prices.
- Chen reported that acute shortages for DDR4 and DDR5 have eased, but high‑end parts used by AI workloads remain tighter and may normalize later than lower‑ and mid‑tier components.
- Retail relief will lag factory output because new fabs and capacity take months to start up, so consumers seeking lower costs now can most reliably choose older CPU/GPU generations or lower‑tier systems.