IDC warns PC market could shrink up to 9% in 2026 due to skyrocketing RAM pricing — even moderate forecast hits 5% drop as AI-driven shortages slam into PC market

The International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new update to its device market outlook, and the message is blunt: things are getting worse. Under newly-reported pessimistic scenarios, shipments of PCs could shrink by up to 9% in 2026, with a more moderate scenario showing a 5% shrinkage in the market. These figures have been revised from a 2.5% drop, which was recently published in IDC's November forecast.

Since then, the global memory shortage, which began accelerating in mid-October, has intensified beyond what IDC originally modeled. While the firm isn't formally rewriting its official forecast entirely, it's now laying out scenarios that are notably more pessimistic than what it projected just a few weeks ago.

The underlying driver is the same force distorting much of the tech industry in late 2025: AI infrastructure. Memory demand from hyperscalers has surged so aggressively that DRAM and NAND production has been structurally redirected away from consumer devices and toward high-margin enterprise components like high-bandwidth memory and dense DDR5. This is an economically rational choice on the part of memory manufacturers, but IDC is clear that this isn't a typical boom-and-bust cycle; it's a strategic reallocation of silicon capacity that could persist for years, not quarters.