Surging DRAM costs kill $200 smartphones in India and Africa
- Source
- David Oks
- Time
- 6:12 AM
- Weight
- 94/100
The global smartphone market is undergoing a structural reset as the era of cheap mobile computing faces a sharp reversal. Driven by the explosive demand for artificial intelligence, the world’s three major memory manufacturers—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—have shifted significant production capacity away from standard consumer DRAM toward High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) used in AI data centers.
This reallocation has caused the price of mobile memory components to surge by over 200% in some regions, making the production of entry-level smartphones increasingly uneconomical. The impact of this "memory crunch" has been most severe in price-sensitive markets such as India and Africa, where budget devices under $200 dominate.