Acer’s Jason Chen Says PC Prices Should Start Falling After Early 2027

Acer’s top executive thinks the memory squeeze that has pushed PC prices up all year will break sooner than the chipmakers say. Chairman and CEO Jason Chen told reporters that PC prices should stop climbing in the first half of 2027 and start coming down after that, putting him at odds with memory suppliers who talk about tight supply lasting until 2030.

Chen made the comments to DigiTimes, as Tom’s Hardware reported. Relief won’t come right away. Because supplier pricing reaches store shelves with a lag of a few months, he expects PC prices to rise another 5% to 20% toward the end of this year before leveling off.

“Prices won’t come down until the year 20-whatever”

Chen said only a narrow set of parts is genuinely short, such as high-end LPDDR5X-9600 memory and Nvidia’s N1 and N1X chips, and that supply of most memory and SSDs has caught up. He argued that the big memory makers naturally want to keep their margins high for longer, “so they keep putting out the message: let me tell you, prices won’t come down until the year 20-whatever.”

Those makers have been gloomier. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said earlier this year that tight supply would last beyond 2027, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung projected shortages peaking in 2027 and staying tight through 2030, and Adata chairman Chen Li-bai forecast elevated prices for another decade, TechSpot reported. Demand from AI data centers has roughly quintupled DRAM prices since last year.

Chinese suppliers are a big part of Chen’s math. He expects cheaper memory from makers such as CXMT to disrupt the market, and Acer, HP and Asus have already started using CXMT chips in some products. Apple has reportedly considered CXMT as a supplier too, even though the company sits on the Pentagon’s blacklist, Mashable noted.

Chen isn’t claiming costs are falling across the board. He said SSDs, circuit boards and the fiberglass cloth used in motherboards are all seeing their own increases. “A lot of people come and tell us they want to raise prices, and we find it a bit baffling — this needs to go up, too?” he said.

Analysts are less hopeful

Jitesh Ubrani, an analyst director at IDC, had told Mashable earlier that memory supply “will remain tight from a device’s perspective for the remainder of 2026 and well into 2027.” He added: “And even in 2028, assuming this new [memory] capacity comes online and is able to provide some alleviation, we don’t see device prices dropping significantly.”