Hardware and the AI buildout

Three manufacturers make almost all of the world's memory, and they have moved production toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI chips use. Less ordinary memory comes out, so the RAM in laptops and servers roughly doubled in price in early 2026. SSDs followed, because AI servers need far more storage than ordinary ones. Dell, Lenovo and HP raised their prices, and some shrank the memory and storage in their default models to hold the old price.

Do not plan on waiting it out. The memory maker SK hynix now expects the shortage to last through the end of 2030, so budget on today's prices.

For most office work, 16 GB of memory and a 512 GB SSD are enough. Off-lease business laptops from 2020 to 2022 run Windows 11 and did not rise in price the way new machines did. Spread purchases over a few orders instead of refreshing the whole office at once. If you still run Windows 10, it stopped getting security updates in October 2025: machines that qualify upgrade to Windows 11 for free, and the article on leaving it covers what to do with the rest.

A few articles look at machines for running an AI model in your own office, from a Mac mini to NVIDIA's DGX Spark, and at what that costs set against paying a cloud service per use.