If you have priced a laptop, a server or a batch of SSDs in the last few months, you will have noticed. Quotes are coming back well above what the same specification cost a year ago, and in some categories the gap is not small.
Two separate things are happening at once, and neither is your supplier taking liberties.
The hardware story
Memory prices have gone vertical. PC DRAM contract prices rose 105–110% in a single quarter in Q1 2026 — the steepest quarterly increase on record. Conventional DRAM across all segments climbed 90–95%. Enterprise SSD contract prices rose around 80% over the same period, and forecasts for Q2 put NAND flash up a further 70–75%.
The cause is not mysterious. The same fabrication lines that produce ordinary computer memory are being redirected to high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, where the margins are considerably better. Every wafer allocated to an AI datacentre is a wafer not going into a laptop or a file server. Analysts estimate AI infrastructure will consume roughly 70% of high-end DRAM output this year.
This is not expected to resolve quickly. Current projections have the shortage running into 2028, easing only as new fabrication capacity comes online.
The software story
Separately, Microsoft’s commercial price changes take effect on 1 July 2026. Increases range from around 5% on E5 through to 43% on certain Frontline configurations, depending on the plan. Microsoft is adding capability to justify the change — Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 and Intune Remote Help among them — but the direction of the bill is upward regardless.
For larger organisations the effect compounds, because the removal of Enterprise Agreement volume discounts pushes the real increase well above the headline figure.
The part worth noticing
While the price of the licences you already hold is going up, the price of Copilot has come down. Microsoft cut the SMB rate from $30 to $21 per user per month in December 2025, with promotional pricing as low as $18 running through to September 2026, and new bundles pairing it with Business Standard and Business Premium.
Read that however you like. The commercial logic is not hard to follow: AI adoption is being made cheap to encourage it, and the cost is recovered from the products everybody already pays for.
What to actually do about it
None of this is a crisis. It is a budgeting problem, and it responds well to being planned rather than reacted to.
Bring forward refreshes you have already budgeted. If a machine or a server was due for replacement in the next twelve months, this is the unusual situation where buying sooner is cheaper than buying later. Prices are still climbing.
Do not panic-buy. Hardware that is working today will still be working next quarter. Rising prices are a reason to plan, not a reason to replace equipment that is doing its job.
Specify honestly. Over-provisioning memory “just in case” was sensible advice when RAM was cheap. At current prices, an extra 32GB nobody uses is real money. Buy for the workload in front of you.
Review licensing before 1 July. Annual commitments generally lock in current rates, so there is a window here. It is worth knowing what you are on and what it will become.
Audit what you are already paying for. This is the cheapest saving available and it requires buying nothing. Most organisations are carrying seats nobody uses — staff who have moved on, duplicated licences, plans that were upgraded once and never reviewed. We have yet to look at a tenant that did not have some of this.
Where this leaves you
The businesses that come through the next eighteen months well will not be the ones that spent the most or the least. They will be the ones that looked at the whole picture — hardware lifecycle, licensing position, actual usage — and made deliberate decisions, instead of approving each quote as it landed and wondering later where the money went.
If you would like a second opinion on your hardware refresh plan or your licensing position before July, we are happy to look. No obligation, and we will tell you if there is nothing worth changing.