We’ve covered the RAM shortage and its ripple effects on this blog before, but those were industry stories — analyst projections, quarterly forecasts, numbers from TrendForce and IDC. Last month, it showed up on my desk.
A radiologist I support asked me to get a price on another HP Z2 Mini G9 Workstation — same machine he’d bought in May 2025 for $1,079. I told him PC prices had been climbing and I wasn’t sure what I’d find. I pulled up the same link we’d used to order it last time. The price on HP’s website was $3,223.
That’s a 199% increase in ten months.
Shopping Around
Nobody is going to pay triple, so I started looking. HP no longer sells the Z2 Mini G9 as a current model — they’ve moved to the Z2 Mini G1i. Dell retired its Precision compact line entirely, rebranding it as the “Pro Max” series. Every vendor has reshuffled their product lines, and every price has gone up.
After reaching out to our Dell rep and our CDW rep, I got two quotes:
| Option | Price | vs. Original |
|---|---|---|
| Original HP Z2 Mini G9 (May 2025) | $1,079 | — |
| Dell Pro Max Micro | $1,719 | +59% |
| HP Z2 Mini G1i (CDW) | $2,198 | +104% |
| HP Z2 Mini G9 (HP.com) | $3,223 | +199% |
All three alternatives have comparable specs: 32 GB DDR5, 512 GB NVMe SSD, and a current-generation Intel processor. The Dell includes an NVIDIA RTX A400 discrete GPU, which matters for radiology use. The CDW quote for the HP didn’t even specify whether a discrete GPU was included.
The best deal I could find — a Dell, not the HP he wanted — was still $640 more than what he paid last year.
Why
It’s not one thing. It’s everything inside the box.
RAM. PC DRAM prices doubled in Q1 2026 alone — a record for any single quarter, per TrendForce. HP now says memory accounts for 35% of its PC build costs, up from 15–18% a year ago. AI data centers are consuming 70% of global memory production, and every major manufacturer is prioritizing enterprise contracts over PCs.
SSDs. All 2026 NAND flash production is already sold out. Phison’s CEO has called it a “pricing apocalypse through 2027.” Kingston says NAND costs are up 246%.
GPUs. NVIDIA has cut production 30–40% in the first half of 2026 because its chips need memory too, and there isn’t enough to go around. Any workstation with a discrete GPU — which ours needs for radiology — is competing for scarce supply.
Tariffs. A 15% import surcharge took effect in late February, and the Commerce Department has signaled that semiconductor-specific tariffs could follow within months.
Intel’s CEO said in February there’s “no relief until 2028.” New fabs from Micron and SK Hynix won’t reach volume production until 2027 at the earliest, and that capacity is already spoken for by AI customers.
The Decision
I sent both quotes to the radiologist. His response: “That is substantial … Will keep you posted.”
He hasn’t decided whether to buy. And I get it. When a $1,079 purchase becomes a $1,719 purchase on a good day, the math changes. It’s not that he can’t afford it — it’s that the value proposition has shifted. The machine does the same thing it did last year. The only thing that’s changed is the price.
This is what the memory shortage looks like when it stops being an industry story and starts being a line item on a purchase order. Multiply this across every IT department, every doctor’s office, every school district placing hardware orders this year, and you start to understand why IDC is projecting the PC market could shrink by 9% in 2026.
If you’re planning a hardware refresh, plan for sticker shock. And if you bought last year, you got a deal you didn’t know you were getting.