Amazon Raised the Price of an Echo Dot From $50 to $80 Overnight, and the Reason Is the AI Data Centers
About This Episode
Amazon quietly raised prices across its entire first-party hardware line on August 21 with no announcement, by as much as 60%, telling Fortune it was absorbing 'significant increases in memory and storage component costs.' The cause is a memory shortage created by AI data centers outbidding consumer electronics for DRAM and NAND — a squeeze JPMorgan projects at more than 400% price growth from 2024 to the end of 2026, reversing roughly fifty years in which memory got about 90% cheaper every five years.
Our Take
Memory chips were the one thing in an ordinary household that had genuinely been getting cheaper for fifty years, and the machines being built to end scarcity just outbid you for them — so the abundance story arrives, for now, as a higher price on the shelf.