Memory spiked first, CPUs followed, now PCBs could be the next victim of the AI boom

[Daniel Sims]

In a nutshell: The ongoing AI boom has already inflated the cost of memory, storage, and processors, with effects spilling over to electronics incorporating those components. The impact of AI data center expansion is not expected to subside anytime soon, and to make matters worse, the conflict between the US and Iran threatens to worsen supply chain disruptions while creating new ones.

TrendForce reports that DRAM and NAND costs will continue increasing in the second quarter of 2026 as demand from AI data centers remains strong. Meanwhile, sources from the tech industry supply chain have informed Nikkei Asia that shortages of basic materials will raise the prices of printed circuit boards and other components.

As DRAM manufacturers continue diverting production capacity to server and high-bandwidth applications, contract prices are anticipated to rise by 58% to 63% in Q2 compared to the previous quarter. Demand from data centers is also expected to increase NAND flash prices by between 70% and 75% during the same period.

Due to the shortages, price hikes for laptops and gaming devices are expected to continue, although the impact on smartphones will be somewhat less severe. Solid-state drive supply is also expected to tighten this year and is unlikely to improve before late 2027 or 2028.

The ongoing war between the US and Iran is also expected to add to the upward pressure on technology prices. The conflict has significantly slowed shipping lanes, increasing the cost of not only oil but also many other raw materials and lesser-known components vital to everyday products.

For example, shortages of external modulation lasers and continuous-wave lasers might increase the prices of transceivers and certain kinds of PCBs. Broadcom stated that lead times for PCBs have extended from six weeks to six months. Rising transportation costs have also filtered down to the cost of silver, copper, and plastic, which might even make packaging more expensive. Eternal Materials COO Henry Chen warned that if the war lasts much longer, basic products such as bottles, plastic bags, and gloves might face shortages.

This follows prior reports that the AI boom is also diverting manufacturing capacity for CPUs. Intel and AMD confirmed in early March that they are facing supply chain issues, which could result in price hikes of between 10% and 15% from OEM PC manufacturers such as Dell and HP.

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Memory spiked first, CPUs followed, now PCBs could be the next victim of the AI boom

 

[NumberNine]

The silliest part of all this is, there has yet to be any artificial intelligence.
Are we having fun yet?

 

[Subset6]

Nah, it won’t. We’ve already seen cracks forming in the AI bubble, like with Google’s compression algorithm, as DRAM prices dropped and Micron’s stock took a hit. It’s hugely overvalued, and when the inevitable efficiency technology arrives, whether software or hardware, delivering better, faster, cheaper performance, the dominoes will really fall and the market will correct itself.

Sadly, companies like Micron may be the first to fall, as their position in this market space is tenuous, with all their proverbial eggs in the AI basket..

 

[OortCloud]

The silliest part of all this is, there has yet to be any artificial intelligence.
Are we having fun yet?

Who would have thought that entirely dumb LLMs would cause the easily led captains of industry to have such a knee jerk reaction? I guess we've seen this before so shouldn't be surprised that they would have such an over reaction to these mis-sold models. You wonder how Jensen, Alman et al sleep at night knowing what a lie this has become and how far down the rabbit hole the world has gone in response to something that has nothing to do with any form of true AI? How much longer can they keep juggling this charade before everybody cottons on?

 

[yRaz]

Nah, it won’t. We’ve already seen cracks forming in the AI bubble, like with Google’s compression algorithm, as DRAM prices dropped and Micron’s stock took a hit. It’s hugely overvalued, and when the inevitable efficiency technology arrives, whether software or hardware, delivering better, faster, cheaper performance, the dominoes will really fall and the market will correct itself.

Sadly, companies like Micron may be the first to fall, as their position in this market space is tenuous, with all their proverbial eggs in the AI basket..

They'll be fine, they'll just go back to making memory like they did pre-memory shortage. These companies flat out said they weren't investing in expanding capacity because they didn't believe the demand would last forever. Surprise, the damand didn't last forever and the prices are coming back down.

If they built new fabs at the start of the memory shortage they wouldn't even be done by now.

 

[Endymio]

The silliest part of all this is, there has yet to be any artificial intelligence.
Are we having fun yet?

AI is revolutionizing the fields of aerospace, medicine, logistics, defense, security, materials science, drug development, predictive maintenance, financial fraud detection, and a thousand others -- but the same people who said horseless carriages would never replace good ol' hayburners still bleat "but it's not really intelligent!"

We’ve already seen cracks forming in the AI bubble

The AI bubble will burst the same way the Internet dot.com bubble did -- even at the very peak of the 'decline', usage, penetration, and total sales revenues of related products and services will continue to rise monotonically.

 

[Str8Shot]

The world is being engineered into a crisis, or, as the Scottish Rite Freemason President Trump's motto is: Ordo Ab Chao - order out of chaos. And it'll be THEIR order, on THEIR terms unless people rise up.

 

[Endymio]

The world is being engineered into a crisis, or, as the Scottish Rite Freemason President Trump's motto is: Ordo Ab Chao - order out of chaos. And it'll be THEIR order, on THEIR terms unless people rise up.

Rise up ye oppressed brethren and revolt! The insurrection may be long and bloody, but worth it to guarantee us cheap videogame components. Moar FPS for the masses!

 

[Gezzer]

AI is revolutionizing the fields of aerospace, medicine, logistics, defense, security, materials science, drug development, predictive maintenance, financial fraud detection, and a thousand others -- but the same people who said horseless carriages would never replace good ol' hayburners still bleat "but it's not really intelligent!"


The AI bubble will burst the same way the Internet dot.com bubble did -- even at the very peak of the 'decline', usage, penetration, and total sales revenues of related products and services will continue to rise monotonically.

So your portfolio is AI tech stocks heavy?

The bubble will burst, and the recovery when it does isn't guaranteed. There's more examples of tech that didn't, then there is of tech that rebounded to the point where it went back to dominating the marketplace.

IMHO the current "AI" has many uses and can be amazing... at times. It can also **** the bed in very funny and/or scary ways. A LLM AI isn't a general AI and more importantly won't lead to a general AI. And for AI to really become more than a really impressive "parlor trick" in the majority of uses, there needs to be a move away from LLM.

That's not to say that LLM won't be used in a general AI. But I don't see it as being the base ability that general AI will use. Just like how with humans language is a large part of our ability to reason, there are other skills and abilities we use in the act of reasoning. For example, we can extrapolate with incomplete data and make reasonable "guesses" as we reason out a problem's solution.

Let's see LLM do that.