For the first time in two years, the world bought fewer PCs. Global shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations fell 3.6% in the second quarter of 2026, to 65.7 million units, according to the analyst firm Omdia. The cause is not weak demand. It is the price of memory, and the reason it is soaring leads straight back to AI.
The AI boom has a voracious appetite for memory chips. Data centres are buying up DRAM and NAND to feed their servers, and that has drained supply for everything else. Prices have jumped, and device makers are passing the cost on. The gadgets in your pocket and on your desk are the collateral damage.
The first PC decline in two years
Desktops held up better, slipping 1.3% to 13.9 million units. Notebooks took the hit, down 4.2% to 51.7 million. Across comparable models, Omdia says prices have risen by roughly 20% to 40% against a year ago.
Oddly, sales did not crater. Many buyers simply moved fast. Facing warnings of further rises, shoppers and IT departments brought their purchases forward to beat the next hike. That props up the numbers now, but it borrows from the future. More than half of the business resellers Omdia polled in June said customers are delaying hardware refreshes until prices settle.
