2025 was a tough year for us. Constant price increases from tariffs. Not only constant increases, but constant uncertainty. What country is the product produced in? What are their tariff costs? Did their tariff just get repealed? When does it go into effect?
This year, we are faced with more possible tariffs along with a memory shortage for DRAM memory shortage. “D what you say?”. In engineering school a teacher asked if you had a dynamic memory, would it be a good thing.
The not so obvious answer is no. Since Dynamic memory is a type of chip that has to have constant power, or it loses its memory. But it is super-fast memory, so it is very useful in computers for processing data more than long term storage. Especially cloud computing and more specifically computing used for AI.
Cloud Computing uses large DRAM chips that are expensive, mobile computing, like what we sell, uses much smaller memory chips that have been around for a while, and have had price erosion. So, when demand goes up for the larger, more expensive DRAM chips to support all of the new data centers being built, guess what chips the memory makers stop producing and create a shortage of? The low-end chips that our products use.
So, supply goes critically down and the prices go critically up. Welcome to the crisis of 2026 in our industry.
Hopefully the situation remedies itself and we don’t have another round of tariffs this year. We will stay on top of all of this in our industry for you and try to keep you informed in case you want to buy ahead to avoid future shortages or price increases.
If you want to partner with a company that is keeping up with the latest in technical advancements, www.emptechgroup.com is the best way to reach us.