- The ongoing DRAM shortage will affect TVs too
- Expect cheaper TVs to get price hikes first
- There’s no sign of the shortage ending any time soon
Samsung says it can’t rule out price hikes on new TVs due to the ongoing shortage of memory chips. Speaking to Reuters, co-CEO T M Roh said of the shortage: “As this situation is unprecedented, no company is immune to its impact.” He added that the shortage was affecting everything from mobile phones to consumer electronics – not just TVs but home appliances too.
Samsung is the world’s number one TV maker so it has buying power that smaller rivals lack; like other big players like Apple it locks in supply for months and years in advance so it’s less subject to short-term issues.
However, Roh admitted that some impact on prices was “inevitable” as the shortage continues. So if you’re thinking of buying one of the best TVs, especially at the entry-level or mid-range part of the market, you might want to make your move sooner rather than later.
What’s causing the memory chip shortage?
As we reported in December 2025, there are multiple factors contributing to a severe memory chip shortage. Almost all modern system memory and lots of SSD drives use DRAM chips, and demand was already growing when the AI boom kicked in.
AI training needs tons of memory, and whenever high demand meets limited capacity prices start to skyrocket – just as they did when COVID caused chip factories to shut down or when crypto miners started hoovering up all the graphics cards. And because there’s so much money sloshing around in AI, chip makers are changing their focus to concentrate on the Very Hungry Caterpillars of AI, the data centers.
As IDC explained in December 2025: “Instead of expanding conventional DRAM and NAND used in smartphones, PCs, and other consumer electronics, major memory makers have shifted production toward memory used in AI data centers, such as high-bandwidth (HBM) and high-capacity DDR5. This has restricted the supply of general-purpose memory modules and driven up prices across the board.”
IDC continues: “AI servers and enterprise environments require far more memory per system than consumer devices, so the AI build-out is pulling a disproportionate share of global capacity and creating shortages… this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity.”
That’s likely to seriously affect the smartphone market in 2026 and beyond, because memory accounts for as much as 20% of the material cost of a mid-range phone and 10-15% of a flagship. We’re already seeing smartphone specs going backwards as a result.
The effect on TVs is likely to be less dramatic than on devices such as PCs and smartphones because they use less RAM for both memory and storage; that RAM is also a much smaller proportion of the overall component cost, because the panel is the most expensive component by a huge margin.
That said, profit margins in the TV business are already exceptionally thin, so even the biggest brands don’t have much wiggle room if component costs rise significantly. And that’s particularly true at the more affordable end of the market, where the margins are thinnest. As the shortages continue, cheaper TVs are where the first price hikes are likely to bite.
The best TVs for all budgets
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