Samsung’s consumer device chief has said that the global rush to build AI infrastructure is squeezing the supply of smartphone memory chips, pushing up the prices across the S26 range in India and the US. When Samsung announced Galaxy S26 series last month, the prices were noticeably higher as compared to the last year’s model. TM Roh, President and Head of Samsung’s Mobile eXperience Business, has acknowledged that the price increases on the Galaxy S26 series are tied to the global expansion of AI infrastructure.
“A lot of this (increase in smartphone price) is affected by the current ongoing expansion of AI infrastructure,” Roh told The Finacial Times in an interview.
How much of a price hike has Samsung implemented
The price increases are significant across the entire Galaxy S26 lineup in India as well as the US. The Galaxy S26 Ultra now starts at Rs 1,39,999 – a jump of Rs 10,000 over the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s launch price of Rs 1,29,999. When it comes to the higher storage variants, the 512GB variant priced around Rs 18,000 more and the 1TB model costing approximately Rs 24,000 more than its predecessor.
Similarly, the Galaxy S26 price in India starts at Rs 87,999, up around Rs 7,000 from last year’s base model.
The Galaxy S26+ price starts at Rs 1,19,999, roughly Rs 20,000 higher than the Galaxy S25+. Samsung has also raised prices in the United States, where two models in the S26 range have gone up by $100.
Why smartphone prices are going up
Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta, among others are racing to build out data centres capable of powering the next generation of AI, and for that, they need memory chips which are in shortage.
The crunch comes down to a shift in priorities among the world’s major memory chip manufacturers, including SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung itself as these companies have redirected their production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips – the specialised, high-performance memory used in AI data centres to power models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
This reassigning of memery chip for AI infrastructure has reduced the supply of standard memory chips used in consumer devices like smartphones and laptops, sending the demand soaring and by extension prices of consumer have gone up.
How does this compare to Apple
Apple, despite facing similar market pressures, defied analyst expectations last year by choosing not to raise prices on the iPhone 17 family. Company CEO Tim Cook has said that the problem is not the shortage of memory chip but of its A and M series processors.
