Dive Brief:
- Total global shipments of desktops, notebooks and workstations fell 21% year over year in the third quarter of 2026, according to Omdia research published Friday. Rising costs are forcing IT leaders to hold back on buying, Omdia said, but ongoing supply chain shortages are pushing PC vendors to continue raising prices.
- The drop in shipment volumes is consistent with retailers’ reports of lagging sales amid double-digit jumps in average unit selling prices, Ishan Dutt, research director at Omdia, said in a press release. “The impact of upstream component cost increases has now fully worked its way through to end-market pricing, with consumers and IT decision-makers responding accordingly,” he said.
- Meanwhile, PC vendors are also grappling with memory shortages in the aftermath of a rapid AI infrastructure buildout. The cost share of memory in PCs has risen from around 15% to nearly 40%, Ben Yeh, principal analyst at Omdia, said in the press release.
Dive Insight:
The PC market is expected to continue facing chip and memory shortages as AI infrastructure places heavy demand on the same compute components — and costs rise accordingly.
Hyperscaler spending on data centers to power AI will grow 55.8% and surpass $788 billion in 2026, according to Gartner projections. As AI workloads scale and data center investments increase, demand for high-performance compute power is also rising, creating shortages for other vendors in the market.
PC shipments are projected to face a 24% decline in the final quarter of 2026 and a 7% decline in 2027, according to Omdia.
“Although PC vendors have raised prices multiple times over the past few quarters, these increases have yet to fully offset the impact,” Yeh said in the release. “These pressures are expected to persist, and the current decline may be just the beginning of a new downward cycle.”
Shipments of specialized AI PCs were also expected to decelerate in 2026, according to research from The Futurum Group published earlier this year.
However, the analyst firm anticipated that growth rates will normalize in 2027 as enterprises enter regular refresh cycles that will continue to alter the PC market. AI PCs could replace most traditional PCs in the next refresh cycle, Olivier Blanchard, research director of devices at The Futurum Group, told CIO Dive in a previous interview.
Vendors are aiming to draw in more enterprise spend by broadening on-device AI capabilities. This week, Microsoft and Nvidia said in a press release that the companies are “co-engineering hardware and software for AI agents to run on Windows PCs.” In August, Apple debuted new chips for its desktop computers to support on-device AI workloads.
Disclosure: Informa owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind CIO Dive and parent company of Omdia. Informa has no influence over CIO Dive’s coverage.
