hardware AM market analysis — 2026-07-10

The AM session reinforces the consumer hardware damage from AI-driven memory cost inflation. PC vendors have been forced to raise prices by twenty to forty percent year-over-year due to memory and storage cost increases, according to ThinkComputers, contributing directly to a decline in global PC shipments in Q2 2026. Omdia’s assessment, cited by HotHardware, adds a structural dimension: neither memory nor storage is expected to see a meaningful price reversal this year, meaning the headwinds on PC demand and enterprise refresh cycles are likely to persist through at least year-end.

Apple again proved the exception. Strong M-series Mac growth drove the company to outperform the broader market decline in Q2, reinforcing the pattern of premium hardware being insulated from commodity cost pressure while volume OEMs absorb the full impact.

The root cause is a semiconductor supply chain that is prioritising data centre demand above all else. The chain itself is highly concentrated across a small set of specialised actors, each a potential single point of failure under sustained demand acceleration. NVIDIA is responding on the architecture side with integrated CPU-GPU-DPU networking fabrics designed to extract more AI performance per unit of constrained silicon, but that addresses efficiency within data centres rather than the underlying supply imbalance that is compressing consumer hardware markets.