The first big deal is around hardware availability. It’s like a broken record, just which part is going to be in scarce supply this time. We’ve seen everything from CPU shortages to paper GPU launches, heck even Microsoft couldn’t print enough Windows licenses at one point! But starting a couple of months ago and now in full force is the NAND and RAM supply crisis. It began with DDR5 RAM modules, the little dudes that go on the sticks to cache data your CPU needs to operate. These are used by every computer out there right now, from laptops to desktops to servers. And as data center buildouts get closer to completion, the big data guys need servers to populate them. The growth in AI has led to a need for more data centers, and the memory guys just can’t keep up.

Micron is one of the big three memory producers, holding about 20% of the RAM market, and in a recent interview they said that their new production facility would not be operational until at least 2027 with real production ramping up in 2028. This is a building in Idaho that was started three years ago, so you can see how long it takes to make more products. They’ve also announced a second new facility in New York that will break ground this year, but we can’t expect that to help with the supply crisis any time soon. It takes a long time to build a 600,000 sq ft clean room after all. Samsung and SK Hynix may be able to get some more production online sooner, but RAM is just not looking good for 2026.

Additionally, and more recently, NAND shortages are hitting us harder. These little dudes are mounted on PCBs that make up the SSDs in your PC, phone, etc. This is persistent storage that enables things to stick around after the power goes out, and data centers need a lot of these also. This is maybe not as bad as the RAM shortage, but it’s tough to say. Both are really bad right now, but the RAM one is making all of the headlines currently.

What does this mean for our clients though? Well, starting off, our costs on RAM and SSDs have gone up about 3x since this all started last quarter. A $50 SSD is now $150. This means our PC prices are going up to help cover the costs. It also means that procurement on parts is going to be tougher. We’re going to be sitting on builds waiting for RAM and SSDs. We have invested in increased inventory to try and mitigate this, but we’re just not Dell or HP, so there are limits to what we can do. Our vendors are no longer guaranteeing pricing on any of these components, so if you order a server today, the price may go up before our backorders ship. We’ll do our best to keep costs as low as possible, but this is just the market we’re in.

On the rest of the industry, well, AI is taking off and it’s a powerful tool that we should all be getting used to using. While last year was all about getting AI to give us information, I feel like 2026 will be the year that we start having AI actually do things for us. This is called Agentic AI, and the workers are called AI Agents. These guys are plugged into your systems and allowed to make changes to your configurations based on your prompts. Large corporations started building out their own Agents last year, but consumer ones are just now starting to show up. I see this year being the year that Agents begin to show up in our daily lives, not as robots that fold our clothes, but rather as helpers that knock out 5 or 10 tasks in one command. One task I was thinking about this morning was offboarding users. I feel like we will be able to just ask Copilot to offboard a user in plain text and tell it what we want to happen, and it will just happen. I asked the Microsoft 365 Admin Center Agent if it could do that this morning, and it said basically, coming soon.

It also looks like Intel’s new Core Ultra 3 processors for laptops are performing well, and they’re being made in an Intel fab. This is great news for Intel; they needed this win. AMD and NVIDIA have not really tipped their hands as far as what hardware they will release this year. I expect it to be a slow one for desktop hardware.

In networking, wireless is still a somewhat uninteresting topic. Sure, there is a new multi-gig standard around the corner, but with most people on Wi-Fi 6 and being very happy with the throughput, I don’t see a lot of demand for Wi-Fi 7, let alone Wi-Fi 8. No matter how many GBs you can move through the air, there will always be a latency penalty compared to a wire, and that’s what people really feel. Multi-gig switching is also still pretty meh for most of the same reasons. Sure, 10Gb/s is nice on the server, but desktops and laptops really don’t need much more than that when the Internet still tops out at a couple of hundred Mb/s in practice.

We will also be continuing to remove servers from the workplace and migrate users to more cloud solutions when we can. We have already identified two that we will be taking out as they should no longer be needed.

That’s about it. I think that 2026 is going to be a good year, apart from the added stress around procurement. I look forward to seeing you all soon!

-Nate