The memory chip shortage driving up laptop and phone prices this year is hitting TVs from a different, less obvious angle: the DRAM chips inside a television’s own processing board. DRAM’s share of a TV’s total bill-of-materials cost has jumped from roughly 2.5-3% to 6-7%, and contract prices for the 4GB DDR4 chips used in most 4K TVs have more than quadrupled over the past year. Combined with rising display panel costs, TrendForce’s own market analysis now states plainly that “retail price increases for new TV models are now considered unavoidable.”
Why a TV’s Memory Costs So Much More Now
It’s worth being specific about why a component that’s a small part of a TV’s total build cost is driving a real price shift. DRAM chips inside a TV handle the processing behind smart features, image upscaling, and the operating system, a genuinely small physical component relative to the display panel itself. But contract DRAM prices broadly have surged 171% year-over-year, and DDR5 spot prices have roughly quadrupled since September 2025 alone. A cost category that used to be a rounding error on a TV’s bill of materials has become significant enough on its own to move retail prices, even before accounting for the display panel.
The panel side isn’t spared either. Display panels make up 40-50% of a TV’s overall manufacturing cost, the single largest cost component by far, and panel prices began climbing in January 2026 for the first time in several months. That’s a separate, larger cost pressure stacking directly on top of the memory chip increase rather than replacing it.
Where the Demand Is Actually Coming From
The underlying cause traces back to the same AI datacenter buildout squeezing laptop and phone memory: chip manufacturers are prioritizing wafer capacity for AI accelerator memory over the commodity DRAM that goes into consumer electronics like TVs. The scale of that shift is genuinely large. OpenAI alone reportedly intends to order 900,000 wafers in 2029, close to 40% of current global wafer production capacity, and that kind of demand pulls manufacturing capacity away from the DRAM chips a TV needs regardless of how small a fraction of the total build they represent.
New memory production capacity isn’t expected to come online until 2027, which is the detail that turns this from a temporary blip into a genuinely multi-year pricing shift. TrendForce analyst Avril Wu’s direct recommendation, given that timeline, is to buy the devices you need now rather than wait for prices to come back down, since the earliest realistic relief is more than a year out.
Which TVs Get Hit Hardest
Budget TVs are the category most exposed to this shift, and it’s worth understanding why rather than just knowing it as a fact. Budget manufacturers already operate on thin margins to hit their price points, which means they have far less room to absorb a rising component cost without passing it directly to shoppers. A premium TV brand with more margin built into its pricing has more room to eat some of the increase before it shows up on the price tag; a budget brand generally doesn’t have that same cushion.
That’s a meaningful detail if you were specifically shopping the budget end of the market expecting steady pricing. The segment that’s historically been the safest place to find a stable deal is, this year specifically, the one most likely to see a visible price jump.
OLED or Mini-LED: What Still Makes Sense to Buy Now
Setting the pricing pressure aside, the fundamental choice between OLED and Mini-LED hasn’t changed, and it’s worth being clear about which one fits your actual viewing situation rather than just chasing whichever has the better deal this week. OLED remains the right call if you mostly watch in a dark or dim room and care most about deep, true blacks and per-pixel contrast, since OLED panels turn individual pixels fully off rather than dimming a backlight zone. Mini-LED is the better fit for a brighter room, since its higher peak brightness holds up better against daylight or ambient light than OLED’s more modest brightness ceiling.
Retailers are actively clearing 2025 inventory to make room for 2026 models, which has created real, current deals worth taking seriously given the pricing direction: Mini-LED sets like a 55-inch TCL QM5K have been listed as low as $379, down from $699, and 2025 OLED models have been available from around $649. Those are exactly the kind of prices TrendForce’s own analysts are pointing at when they say buy now rather than wait, since a comparable 2026 model is very unlikely to launch cheaper than what a 2025 model is discounted to today.
Screen size and room brightness matter more to that decision than chasing the newest panel generation. A smaller Mini-LED set in a bright, sun-facing living room will look better day-to-day than a larger OLED fighting glare and washed-out contrast against daylight, regardless of which panel technology reviews rank higher on paper. Matching the panel type to the room you’ll actually watch in is a bigger factor in day-to-day satisfaction than the generational gap between a discounted 2025 model and whatever ships in 2026.
It’s Not Just TVs in Your Living Room
The same DRAM and NAND pressure driving up TV prices is showing up across the rest of a home entertainment setup too: soundbars, DACs and hi-res audio players, smart speakers, and in-car entertainment systems are all affected, since any of these that run smart features or store data need the same memory chips that got harder to source. If a full setup, a new TV plus a soundbar, was on this year’s shopping list, it’s worth treating the whole bundle with the same urgency rather than assuming the TV is the only piece exposed to this specific cost pressure.
Is Waiting for 2026’s Actual New Models Worth It
It’s a fair question whether holding out for genuinely new 2026 technology, rather than a discounted 2025 model, makes more sense given how much display tech tends to improve year over year. TrendForce’s own shipment data suggests the honest answer is no, not on price specifically: the firm’s 2026 global TV shipment forecast was revised down to roughly 194.81 million units, a 0.6% year-over-year decline, and its Mini LED penetration forecast was raised to around 10% of the market, near 20 million units, meaning brands are pushing Mini LED harder as part of managing these exact cost pressures rather than pricing new tech aggressively to win share. A new 2026 model with genuinely newer panel tech is very unlikely to launch at a lower price than what a comparable, still-current 2025 model is selling for right now, given that every input cost behind it has moved in one direction this year.
That’s a different question from whether the newest panel technology itself is worth the premium, which is a real, legitimate reason to pay more regardless of the broader pricing environment. It’s specifically the “wait a few months for prices to settle down” strategy that this year’s data argues against, not the case for paying up for genuinely better hardware if that’s what you’re after.
The Actual Buying Decision
None of this means panic-buying a TV you don’t need. It means that if a TV purchase was already on your list for this year, the current window, discounted 2025 inventory being cleared out while 2026 pricing is still absorbing a real, multi-year memory and panel cost increase, is a genuinely better time to buy than waiting for the 2026 lineup to mature or for a bigger sale to show up later in the year. The forces pushing prices up here aren’t seasonal or promotional; they’re tied to a supply shortage multiple analysts expect to run into 2027, which makes “wait for a better deal” a riskier bet on TVs specifically than it’s been in a typical year.
*Sources: TrendForce’s TV market and DRAM cost-share analysis, and current deal pricing aggregated from current industry reporting (TrendForce, Yahoo Tech, Tom’s Guide), cross-checked across multiple 2026 sources.*
Photo credit: “Workspace @ Nottingham Flat” by David Wellbeloved, licensed BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/35339157@N00/5378333486
