Kunal Sancheti.
Kunal Sancheti is the COO of Comprint Tech Solutions, a 33-year-old Mumbai IT infrastructure company.
On Lamington Road last week, a dealer quoted a customer a price for a stick of laptop memory and added a line you never used to hear in this market: the rate is valid till evening. Not till Sunday. Till evening.
The customer laughed. The dealer did not.
Something strange is happening to the most boring parts inside your laptop, the memory chips and the storage drive that nobody thinks about while comparing screens and cameras. Their prices have not crept up. They have exploded. And because almost nobody outside the hardware trade tracks these parts, most buyers will only discover this at the billing counter.
Here is the short version of why. The world has gone all in on artificial intelligence, and AI runs on data centres, and data centres are stuffed with the same memory chips that go into your laptop. Industry trackers estimate that around 70 percent of the world's high-end memory production this year is being swallowed by AI servers. The factories that make these chips cannot expand overnight, so they have done the obvious thing: they serve the customers paying the most, and those customers are not you and me.
The numbers are genuinely startling. Gartner expects memory chip prices to rise about 125 percent this year, and storage chips by over 200 percent. A basic 1TB storage drive that cost around Rs 4,000 late last year now sells for nearly double. In three decades of watching this industry I have seen shortages caused by earthquakes, floods and factory fires. They ended when the factory was rebuilt. This one is different. Nothing is broken. Demand has simply outgrown the planet's ability to make chips, and the people who forecast these things say relief may not come before late 2027.
At Comprint, the Mumbai IT infrastructure company I help run, our procurement desk has watched supplier quotes for memory change twice in a single day. We have been buying hardware in this city for 33 years, through every cycle since the floppy disk, and our buyers now behave the way people behave in a rising vegetable market: when good stock appears at a sane price, you take it, because tomorrow it will not be there.
What does this mean for you in rupees? Indian market watchers project laptop prices rising as much as 35 percent through 2026. The Rs 35,000 laptop is already drifting toward Rs 45,000. The Rs 60,000 machine is heading past Rs 70,000. The cruel part is that cheap laptops are hit hardest, because memory and storage make up a much bigger slice of a budget machine's cost than of a premium one. The student and the first-time buyer pay the steepest premium.
So what should a Mumbai buyer actually do? A few things we tell our own customers and, honestly, our own families.
If you need a machine this Diwali, buy earlier rather than later. Waiting for a festive discount usually makes sense. This year the discount is racing against a rising cost price, and the cost price is winning.
Buy for the next three years, not for today. Choose 16GB of memory over 8GB even if it stings, because upgrading later will cost more than it ever has, and many modern laptops have memory soldered to the board, which means no upgrade at all. The config you buy is the config you die with.
Take refurbished seriously, but only from people who take it seriously. A properly graded, professionally refurbished business laptop with a real warranty is one of the smartest buys in this market. A machine from an unmarked shop with a fifteen-day guarantee scribbled on the bill is not refurbished, it is recycled risk. Shortages breed shortcuts, and the grey market is having an excellent year.
And do not panic-buy specs you will never use. The shortage is real, but it is a reason to buy sensibly and slightly sooner, not to empty your savings on a gaming machine because a YouTube video frightened you.
The old timers in this trade, and I work with a few, including my father, will tell you that memory famines always end. They are right. Factories are being built, capacity will come, and prices will eventually fall the way they always have. But the last shortages ended in quarters. This one is being driven by the biggest technology buildout in history, and it will end on its own schedule, not ours.
Until then, remember the dealer on Lamington Road. When the price of something is valid only till evening, the market is telling you something. It is worth listening.
Kunal Sancheti is the COO of Comprint Tech Solutions, a 33-year-old Mumbai IT infrastructure company.
