Over the past year, investors have zeroed in on AI chips and GPUs. Data centres are scaling quickly, and companies are spending heavily on computing infrastructure. But there’s a quieter ripple effect that deserves attention. The AI boom is beginning to affect everyday consumer devices, from smartphones and laptops to tablets and PCs. The bottleneck is simple: memory. As AI infrastructure expands, demand for RAM is increasingly absorbing the global supply. That tightens availability across the broader memory market and pushes prices higher. For consumer tech companies, this isn’t a minor supply chain issue. Rising memory costs can pressure hardware margins and force difficult pricing decisions in the quarters ahead. Here’s what’s happening and why it matters.  Why AI is tightening the memory market AI models don’t just need powerful chips. They need enormous amounts of fast memory to move and process data in real time. In many cases, memory bandwidth becomes the real bottleneck, not compute....