I don't make phones, yet I pick up RAM chips on the scale of a big smartphone brand. What am I?

Even though its market capitalization is no longer $5 trillion, but a mere $4.691 trillion, Nvidia is still the world's most valuable company today.

And, besides providing material for countless memes and jokes – memes that mostly have to do with the AI bubble burst and a near-apocalyptic crisis – Nvidia is about to change what we pay for phones as soon as 2026.

The AI game

Nvidia is synonymous with AI these days: but once upon a time, only a few had heard of it. Mainly those who wanted to play video games at maximum resolution. And their parents, of course – they were the ones who bought Nvidia's GPUs, or – to put it another way – their video cards.

Video cards got stupid expensive in 2020, when the crypto wave overtook us, because video cards were used in the crypto mining process. These days, GPUs are important for AI calculations and machine learning: and that's how Nvidia got to top the "Largest American companies by market capitalization" list.

Nvidia reaches for the LPDDR RAM

Now, Nvidia has decided to shift its AI servers from traditional DDR5 memory to LPDDR, the low-power chips usually reserved for our beloved smartphones and tablets. This could push server-memory prices to double by late 2026, according to Counterpoint Research. Logically, this would make LPDDR RAM much more expensive as well. Nice.

The global supply chain is already strained after chipmakers cut production of older DRAM to chase high-bandwidth memory for AI hardware, Reuters reports. Counterpoint warns that Nvidia's sudden LPDDR demand is on the scale of a major smartphone maker, a shock the industry isn't prepared for, especially since each AI server needs far more chips than a handset.

The firm expects server-memory costs to soar and overall memory prices to jump about 50% by mid-2026.

A big move

In short, Nvidia's pivot isn't just another headline in the AI hype cycle. It's a move big enough to shake pricing, supply chains, and every company depending on affordable memory. If Nvidia stays on this trajectory, this would mean price hikes are to be expected in 2026.

Don't act surprised next year!

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