The supplier is choosing its customers.

A reseller's quote sits in a laptop refresh file. It was issued in November for 200 machines, approved in the budget, and carries a line at the bottom that nobody read twice: valid until January 1, 2026. In January the buyer asks for it to be reissued. The machines are the same. The new quote is higher, and its terms now say that delivery is subject to availability. The quote is invented for this dispatch. The line at the bottom is the subject.

Last Thursday, January 8, Samsung Electronics guided to fourth-quarter 2025 operating profit of about 20 trillion won, the median of a range from 19.9 to 20.1 trillion, on sales of about 93 trillion won. A year earlier its operating profit was 6.49 trillion won, and in the third quarter of 2025 it was 12.17 trillion.¹ These are estimates, not audited results, and they are not broken out by business. CNBC noted that the figure would surpass Samsung's record of 17.6 trillion won, set in the third quarter of 2018, and reported it as a surge that came as memory prices rose. Counterpoint Research, quoted in the same report, estimates that memory prices rose 40 to 50 percent in the fourth quarter and expects similar gains in the first quarter of 2026, followed by about 20 percent in the second. Its summary of the moment: “Supplier leverage is at an all-time high.”²

My argument is that the profit is a symptom, and the useful lesson for an ordinary technology budget is not that memory got expensive. It is that a plan lists what you planned to buy, while the supplier's plan lists whom the supplier plans to serve. In a seller's market the second list sets the price and the delivery date on the first. A 2026 hardware plan should keep what it needs apart from what it assumed about price and timing, and treat the assumptions as an exposure to manage.

Where the price comes from

The price on a laptop quote is downstream of a decision about wafers. On January 5, the market research firm TrendForce forecast that conventional DRAM contract prices would rise by about 55 to 60 percent from the fourth quarter to the first quarter of 2026, NAND flash by 33 to 38 percent, and client SSDs by at least 40 percent. Its explanation is that suppliers keep moving advanced capacity toward server and high-bandwidth memory products, while U.S.-based cloud providers lock in capacity, “forcing other buyers to accept higher prices.” Some PC makers, it says, are buying memory through module makers at higher prices.³

IDC described the same mechanism on December 18 as “a zero-sum game”: a wafer used for memory in an AI accelerator is a wafer not used for a phone or a laptop. It expects 2026 supply growth below historical norms, 16 percent for DRAM and 17 percent for NAND.⁵ These are forecasts of contract prices and supply, not what any buyer has paid, but they agree on the direction and on the reason.

The supplier chooses

The clearest statement of choice came from Micron on December 3. It announced that it would leave the Crucial consumer business, with shipments through the consumer channel continuing until the end of its fiscal second quarter in February 2026. Its chief business officer, Sumit Sadana, said the decision was made “to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”⁶

The big two Korean makers are reportedly choosing through contract terms. TrendForce, citing the Korean newspaper Hankyung, reported on January 6 that Samsung and SK hynix pitched first-quarter server DRAM prices 60 to 70 percent above the fourth quarter to major clients, including Microsoft and Google, that PC and smartphone buyers are seeing comparable increases, and that both are rejecting long-term agreements of two to three years in favor of quarterly contracts.⁴ Quarterly repricing is what a seller would prefer if it expects prices to keep rising. IDC expects market share among device makers to shift toward the largest vendors, those with inventory and more leverage with suppliers.⁵ Size buys a place in the line.

How it reaches an ordinary buyer

On Dell's third-quarter earnings call in late November, its chief operating officer, Jeff Clarke, said that “the cost basis is going up across all products.”⁸ On December 5, TrendForce reported, citing industry sources, that a Lenovo notice told clients all current quotations and prices would expire on January 1, 2026, and that Dell was expected to raise prices by at least 15 to 20 percent.⁷ IDC wrote that several large PC makers had warned clients of 15 to 20 percent increases and contract resets, and offered two scenarios for 2026 in which average PC prices rise 4 to 6 percent or 6 to 8 percent.⁵

None of that is a forecast for a particular order. It is enough to say that a quote approved in November is not a price for February. On January 4 I argued that technology is not a toaster, bought once and forgotten. This month adds a smaller point: even the purchase price was never fixed. It was a quote, with a date at the bottom.

What a buyer can control

No ordinary buyer can change which customers a memory maker serves first. A buyer can stop treating that decision as if it were a constant. Figure 2 is the sheet I would ask for.

This is not an argument for stockpiling, and it is not a forecast of how long the shortage lasts. Counterpoint's estimates run only through the second quarter, and none of these sources says when prices turn. Clarke himself pointed out that this is not Dell's first memory cycle and put the last one of this size in 2016 through 2017.⁸ Buying early to beat a price rise is also the kind of demand that tightens a shortage, so it should be a deliberate, sized decision, not a reflex.

In a seller's market, your plan's price is set by somebody else's demand.

Before you approve the 2026 hardware plan

• Which lines depend on memory or storage? List each refresh, server, storage and device line, not one total.
• What price does each line assume, and when does it expire? Record the source and the date on the quote, or note that there is none.
• What is the trigger for each lever? Decide in advance when you buy now, defer, or change the configuration.
• What is your place in line? Ask your reseller about allocation and delivery terms, not only the price.

Back to the refresh file. The 200 machines are still the right machines. What changed is the line at the bottom of the quote, which was always part of the plan and was never treated as one. The next version of the file keeps the need where it was and puts the date, the source and the trigger beside it.