(Image credit: Unsplash / Liam Briese)

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• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has warned two big memory chip makers that they need to manufacture chips in the US
• Lutnick said, "Everyone 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 some already nasty memory-related price hikes for laptops and PCs

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The RAM crisis just keeps getting worse, and we’ve started 2026 with a stream of bad news about the price hikes – and the US government is now throwing its weight around, threatening a move that could cause further pricing misery for consumers.

PC Gamer flagged a report from Bloomberg which quotes some stern words for two of the big memory makers uttered by the US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.

Lutnick warned that South Korean and Taiwanese memory chip manufacturers – meaning SK Hynix and Samsung (not Micron, the third giant presence in this arena, which is US-based) – could face up to 100% tariffs if they don’t invest more in the US to increase their chip production facilities in the country.

Lutnick said, "Everyone 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 those tariffs. A 100% tariff would effectively mean a 100% import tax on memory chips coming from abroad, which would, of course, be a hefty price to pay.

The idea, then, is to have these two companies ramp up chip production on US soil to avoid punishing tariffs when selling 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 up the chips made in Asia, and then shipped over, which is what happens with the manufacturing plants that the two firms have currently in the country).

Even Micron doesn’t produce all that much of its total memory chip production in the US, but it does have some manufacturing happening in the country – and plans to expand that considerably further. Indeed, Lutnick made his statement, as reported by Bloomberg, at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new $100 billion multi-foundry complex that Micron is building in New York (part of a $200 billion drive to build new manufacturing facilities in the US).

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Analysis: how might this affect consumers?

(Image credit: Shutterstock / fizkes)

There are some obvious problems here for US consumers, and possibly for the government, too.

For starters, if the US did instigate this 100% tariff move, who’s to say it would have much effect in forcing the hand of either SK Hynix or Samsung in terms of expanding US manufacturing? To say that RAM is a seller’s market right now is possibly the underestimation of the century in the tech world, so it’s not like losing US customers is going to hurt these chip makers or deflate the massive profits they’re currently enjoying.

Ultimately, though, it’s not memory makers or laptop or PC manufacturers that’ll suffer – the real pain will be inflicted on the average US consumer. As noted, the potential measure threatened is effectively a 100% import tax that will just be passed directly on to the buyer of the piece of tech that the memory is inside, as all these cost increases inevitably are.

We could end up in a situation where there’s a forecast 50% price hike coming with RAM in Q1 of 2026, over the next couple of months, on top of the already miserably large increases witnessed in the final quarter of 2025. And then, on top of that, US consumers will have to pay more if what’s effectively a 100% import tax on memory comes into force, meaning an increase on top of an increase on top of an increase.

More expensive storage, and much more expensive RAM, are going to push up the price of laptops and desktop PCs alike – GPUs are hit in this regard, too (as they have video RAM, which is also now in shorter supply, and therefore more expensive).

It’s tricky to gauge how this might play out, and it’ll vary a good deal from model to model, but the theorized tariffs might mean laptops get something like 10% pricier due to the extra inflation on the bill for RAM – on top of the already steep rises the memory shortage crisis is already causing. Higher-end laptops, and the likes of Copilot+ (AI) PCs, will be hardest hit, as they demand beefier and faster memory configurations.

We aren’t at the point of the US government implementing these measures – they’re 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 – assuming some kind of deal can’t be struck regarding investment in the US with the memory chip makers outside of Micron.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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