Samsung has issued a warning to consumers, investors, analysts and anyone else who might be listening: expect TV prices to go up this year.
The company said this week that prices of dynamic random-access memory and NAND flash chips have gone through the roof lately, increasing by more than double over the last four months or so. That’s good news for Samsung’s chip business, which just posted a record-breaking quarterly operating profit, but it’s not so great for the rest of us.
The problem is artificial intelligence. All of that AI slop we’re seeing on social media requires tons of memory chips to be created, and the demand from AI companies has resulted in supplies being diverted away from consumer electronics. The reason is that chipmakers like Samsung just cannot keep up with the number of orders they’re receiving, and while they’re striving to bring more production capacity online, that’s going to take time.
As a result, there’s a looming shortage of memory chips and it’s going to affect the entire consumer electronics industry, Samsung believes. At CES 2026 this week, a number of Samsung executives spoke to the media, and told them that they believe the shortage will result in rising TV prices this year.
"As this situation is unprecedented, no company is immune to its impact," Samsung’s co-CEO Tae-Moon Roh told Reuters in an interview.
His comments might come as a surprise, for AI servers use very different kinds of memory chips. They’re almost exclusively reliant on high-performance DRAM, also known as “high-bandwidth memory” or HBM chips, whereas TVs are generally fitted with much older and less powerful forms of memory. But the issue is that chipmakers like Samsung are making less of those legacy memory chips so they can manufacture more of the higher-end stuff, which is why supplies are becoming constrained.
TV makers do share a portion of the blame for this, however, as they're increasingly scrambling to add more AI features to their TVs, with things like AI assistants and image editing tools rapidly becoming commonplace on higher-end TVs.
The big question is, how much of a price increase can we expect? So far, we have not seen any real impact on TV prices, mainly because most manufacturers have long-term supply contracts where the prices are fixed in contractual agreements. But those contracts do have to be renewed, and in most cases that’s done annually. With memory chips now costing much more than before, and prices likely to rise further, chipmakers are going to be asking for more money.
Samsung’s head of global marketing Wonjin Lee told Bloomberg that he’s expecting “issues” around semiconductor supplies, and warned that “everyone” is going to be affected by them. “Prices are going up even as we speak,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t want to convey that burden to the consumers, but we’re going to be at a point where we have to actually consider repricing our products.”
According to data published by Omdia last month, the price of DRAM chips for TVs has already more than doubled compared to the first half of 2025. The good news is that memory is just one of many components that go into making TVs, and it’s not nearly the most expensive part. Rather, the displays account for the bulk of the costs.
That said, the TV market is extremely competitive and most brands sell their products with razor-thin profit margins, especially mid-range and lower-end models. In other words, they’re already as cheap as it’s possible to be, so we can almost certainly expect the costs of those models to increase in the coming months. But it might not be so bad for more premium models, which sell for bigger profits, giving companies more scope on how to adjust their prices.
