- Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has warned two major memory chip makers that they need to manufacture chips in the US
- Lutnick said, “Anyone who wants to build memory has two choices: They can pay a 100% tariff or they can build in America. That’s industrial policy.”
- The result of such a move would be painful for consumers, on top of already nasty memory-related price hikes for laptops and PCs
The RAM crisis is only getting worse, and we’ve started 2026 with a flood of bad news about price increases – and now the US government is throwing its weight around, threatening a move that could cause further price volatility for consumers.
PC Gamer filed a report from Bloomberg, which quotes some stern words for two of the major memory makers, uttered by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Lutnick warned that South Korean and Taiwanese memory chip makers – meaning SK Hynix and Samsung (not Micron, the third giant presence in this arena, which is based in the US) – could face up to 100% tariffs if they do not invest more in the US to increase their chip production facilities in the country.
Lutnick said, “Anyone who wants to build memory has two choices: They can pay a 100% tariff or they can build in America. That’s industrial policy.”
In other words, if SK Hynix and Samsung continue to manufacture RAM modules outside the US, in Asia, they could face these tariffs. A 100% tariff would effectively mean a 100% import tax on memory chips coming from abroad, which would obviously be a high price to pay.
So the idea is to get these two companies to increase chip production on American soil to avoid punishing tariffs when they sell to this market. Note that what the US government wants is for SK Hynix and Samsung to actually manufacture RAM chips in the US (and not just package the chips made in Asia and then ship them, which is what happens with the manufacturing facilities the two companies currently have in the country).
Even Micron doesn’t produce that much of its total memory chip production in the US, but it does have some production going on in the country – and plans to expand it significantly further. In fact, as reported by Bloomberg, Lutnick made his statement at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new $100 billion multi-foundry complex that Micron is building in New York (part of a $200 billion effort to build new manufacturing facilities in the United States).
Analysis: How might this affect consumers?
There are some obvious problems here for American consumers, and possibly for the government as well.
First, if the US initiated this 100% tariff move, who is to say that it would have much effect in forcing the hand of either SK Hynix or Samsung in terms of expanding US production? To say RAM is a seller’s market right now might be the understatement of the century in the tech world, so it’s not like losing US customers is going to hurt these chipmakers or drain the huge profits they’re currently enjoying.
Ultimately, though, it won’t be memory makers or laptop or PC manufacturers that will suffer—the real pain will be inflicted on the average American consumer. As mentioned, the potential measure threatened is effectively a 100% import tax that will just be passed on directly to the buyer of the piece of technology that the memory is inside, as all these cost increases inevitably are.
We could end up in a situation where a 50% price increase with RAM in Q1 2026 is expected over the next few months, on top of the already miserable increases witnessed in the last quarter of 2025. And then, on top of that, US consumers will have to pay more if what is effectively a 100% increase in imports, an increase in memory goes into effect rise.
More expensive storage and much more expensive RAM is going to push up the price of both laptops and desktops – GPUs are also affected in this regard (since they have video RAM, which is also now in short supply and therefore more expensive).
It’s hard to gauge how this might play out, and it will vary quite a bit from model to model, but the theorized rates could mean laptops becoming something like 10% more expensive due to the extra inflation on the bill for RAM – on top of the already steep increases, the memory shortage crisis has already been caused. High-end laptops, and similar Copilot+ (AI) PCs, will be hardest hit as they require more powerful and faster memory configurations.
We are not at the point where the US government is implementing these measures – they are just threats at the moment. But the administration clearly believes that leveraging tariffs works, so it’s hardly inconceivable that Lutnick could follow through and enforce such measures—provided some sort of deal on investment in the U.S. with non-Micron memory chip makers can’t be struck.
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