Price Increases Are Here, Or Pending, And For Sure For Memory

March 2, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The rumor mill was buzzing last week about price increases at IBM and in its Power Systems business in particular. We have no idea what is real or not, but we thought it was our responsibility to let you know what is going on in the infrastructure market and why prices increases are inevitable – if they have not already taken place.

What we can tell you is that we watch IBM’s announcements like a hawk and we have not seen any price increases thus far this year. But given the state of the flash and main memory markets, we sure do expect some soon. More on this in a second. First, let’s talk about the rumors.

The first one we heard, which was so dramatic that we ran it up the flagpole with Big Blue and which we got from a business partner who heard it from another one, was that IBM was getting ready to do a 25 percent across the board increase in prices for all hardware, software and services, and that this price change would be launched in early March and take effect in early April. We didn’t put much credence in this rumor. It would have been the most dramatic price change we had seen out of IBM in the four decades we have been watching the company.

We poked around a little more, and we heard one that was specifically about memory price increases coming for Power Systems servers, and that made perfect sense to us give the spike in demand for DDR5 and other kinds of DRAM and the dearth of supply. This specific rumor, which we believe is possible and which comes from a business partner, is that IBM was getting ready in the next few weeks to institute “at least a 15 percent price hike on main memory, if not more.”

All of the OEMs and ODMs and all of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and all of the memory makers – mainly Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology – are talking about this. On Dell’s most recent call with Wall Street, Jeff Clarke, the company’s longtime chief operating officer, explained the situation that all of the server makers are in pretty well:

“Obviously, our price is proprietary – I am not going to share our specific percentages. But look at the spot market. I mean, the spot market for a gigabit of DRAM over the last six months is up nearly 5.5X at $2.39 a gigabit. If you look at NAND, the cost is $0.20 a gigabyte, that’s up nearly 4X over the last six months. The industry analysts have Q2 up over Q1 in a range of 20 percent to 50 percent, and Q3 at 5 percent to 15 percent, with Q4 up 5 percent to 10 percent. Those are estimates. Those are probably in ballparks where things are.”

The thing to remember about what Clarke is saying above is these are sequential price increases, not year on year increases. At the midpoints, that means a $1,000 memory stick at the beginning in Q1 2026 will cost $1,538 and it could be as bad as $1,900. In fact, given the demand for DRAM and flash coming from the hyperscalers and cloud builders, who need both for their massive AI buildout, there is no reason for the big memory and flash makers, who suffered through a terrible price crash in late 2022 through late 2024, to try to boost capacity to try to get a more reasonable market price. Why should they when they can just sit back and count the money? Moreover, even if they did want to increase capacity, memory and flash capacity cannot be added to factories quickly, which is how we end up in these boom bust cycles anyway.

IBM did two price tweaks to bring countries outside of the United States in line, which we reported on here and there last August. IBM raised hardware maintenance prices for Power Systems in June 2025.

In scanning the Internet for news we saw a business partner announced in either late September or early October 2025, which was another price harmonization announcement, and these price changes were set to take effect on January 1, 2026. We have never seen a price announcement out of IBM’s formal customer announcement system about this particular announcement. But here is the relevant part for IBM i shops:

It is not clear what IBM is harmonizing with as part of these price changes. And we are not even sure they are real. But you can read the documents describing this price increase here and there. We will try to get some confirmation from IBM about all of this.

The important thing, we think, is that you can expect to pay a lot more for Power Systems memory, since this looks unavoidable. But remember: You can’t skimp on memory, or you make your processor unbalanced and work takes longer to get done. Time is also money.

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