--- title: "The price surge of DRAM/NAND storage sweeps through consumer electronics! Meta raises the price of Quest VR by up to $100" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/283065736.md" description: "The super cycle of storage chips is fully penetrating the consumer electronics sector! Behind the price increase of Meta's headsets, the global consumer electronics industry is 迎来 a moment of cost reassessment" datetime: "2026-04-16T23:52:04.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/283065736.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/283065736.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/283065736.md) --- # The price surge of DRAM/NAND storage sweeps through consumer electronics! Meta raises the price of Quest VR by up to $100 According to Zhitong Finance APP, Meta Platforms (META.US), the parent company of Facebook, has announced a significant price increase for its Quest virtual reality headsets (the globally popular "Quest VR headset" series) to offset the severe negative impact caused by the recent sharp rise in storage chip costs. This price adjustment by Meta for the Quest is yet another clear signal that the pressure of supply shortages in DRAM/NAND storage chips is further transmitting and penetrating into consumer electronics. As the global construction of AI data centers progresses vigorously, the nearly endless demand for storage chips continues to squeeze the supply side, leading to skyrocketing prices that are rewriting the cost curve for consumer electronics. The consumer electronics sector seems to have no choice but to passively endure price increases and supply pressures. The tech giant stated on its official website: "We are announcing this adjustment because the cost of creating high-performance VR hardware has significantly increased." "The prices of key components—especially storage chips—are rapidly soaring globally, affecting almost all categories of consumer electronics, and VR is no exception." According to the latest statement on Meta's official website, starting from April 19, the prices of Meta Quest 3S (128GB) and Meta Quest 3S (256GB) will be increased by $50, to $349.99 and $449.99, respectively; the price of Meta Quest 3 (256GB) will be raised by $100, to $599.99. The updated pricing will also apply to refurbished models. Although Meta has assured customers that it will continue to invest in VR and "will continue to lead this category," the company has significantly reduced the workforce of its Reality Labs business unit by about 10% as it shifts its business focus from a metaverse-centric virtual reality theme to ambitious artificial intelligence goals. In the niche market of VR headsets, Meta Quest remains one of the most mainstream and largest actual shipment VR headset series globally, essentially serving as the "mass production main force" in the current global VR title market. According to the latest data from IDC, Meta will still lead the global XR market with a 72.2% share in 2025, indicating that the dominance of the Quest platform is still intact; however, the same IDC data also shows that the shipment volume of the exclusively launched Quest VR headset series by Meta has declined by 42.3% year-on-year, reflecting that current VR demand is not experiencing a comprehensive explosion like the past surges in PC and smartphone demand, but is more concentrated among core players and gaming user groups. ## The AI computing power surge will push DRAM/NAND storage chip demand towards exponential expansion According to statistics from market research firm Counterpoint Research, the storage market has entered a "super bull market" phase, with current supply and demand and price conditions far exceeding the historical highs during the 2018 cloud computing boom. Counterpoint Research statistics show that the bargaining power of storage chip suppliers has reached an all-time high, driving overall storage chip prices to rise by at least 50% by the fourth quarter of 2025 Since 2026, DRAM/NAND storage chips have continued to soar. Another research institution, TrendForce, has released its latest memory price survey, estimating that the overall contract price of conventional DRAM will increase significantly by 58%-63% quarter-on-quarter in the second quarter of 2026 (previously, the expected price increase for conventional DRAM in Q1 was 93% to 98%). The NAND Flash market continues to be dominated by AI training/inference and widespread demand from data centers, with the chain reaction of price increases across the entire product line remaining strong. It is expected that the overall contract price in the second quarter will increase significantly by 70%-75% on top of the nearly 100% increase in the first quarter. From the perspective of the consumer electronics supply chain, Meta's price increase for the Quest VR headset signifies that the unprecedented wave of AI computing infrastructure investment led by cloud computing giants is strong enough to rewrite the cost curve of consumer electronics, rather than indicating that "the Quest VR headset is selling too well." As Meta's announcement shows, the global price increase of key components, especially storage chips, is impacting almost all categories of consumer electronics. This price increase for the Quest highlights that the extreme imbalance in supply and demand for DRAM/NAND has fully spilled over from the AI data center chain to consumer electronic hardware such as VR, PCs, and gaming consoles. For the capital market, this continues to reinforce the investment theme that "beneficiaries of the storage supercycle are upstream, while pressure bearers are downstream terminal brands"—in other words, price increases may not be good news for hardware sellers like Meta, but they are continuously enhancing the bargaining power of SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, Micron Technology, and the enterprise storage manufacturing chain. The reason why the "storage supercycle" has become one of the hardest investment themes in the AI investment wave is that HBM/DRAM/NAND has evolved from a cyclical product to one of the most scarce constraints for computing power expansion. Wall Street's current core prediction regarding the supply and demand dynamics of storage chips is that the mismatch in supply and demand for HBM memory/NAND flash may continue until around 2028, and the market still underestimates the profit growth trajectory of this round of storage chip manufacturers. Whether it is the enormous TPU AI computing cluster led by Google or the massive NVIDIA AI GPU computing cluster, both rely on HBM storage systems that need to be fully integrated with AI chips; in addition to HBM, the current acceleration of new or expanded AI data centers by tech giants like Google and OpenAI also requires large-scale purchases of server-level DDR5 storage and enterprise-level high-performance SSD/HDD storage solutions. Because of this, the stock price of Sandisk, a leader in enterprise SSD products, has significantly increased since the beginning of 2026 and has experienced extreme levels of revaluation over the past year—this is essentially not just simple emotional speculation, but rather the market is reassessing the "AI-driven storage pricing power." Throughout 2025, Sandisk's stock price surged an astonishing 580%, and this year it continues to showcase an epic growth trend akin to a "global storage chip myth"—having skyrocketed 300% since the beginning of the year, it is undoubtedly the "super bull stock" in the theme of AI computing infrastructure in the global stock market ### Related Stocks - [META.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/META.US.md) - [SNDK.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SNDK.US.md) - [DRAM.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/DRAM.US.md) - [SOXL.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SOXL.US.md) - [FBL.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/FBL.US.md) - [SMH.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SMH.US.md) - [METW.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/METW.US.md) - [XSD.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/XSD.US.md) - [SOXQ.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SOXQ.US.md) - [SOXX.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SOXX.US.md) - [FTXL.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/FTXL.US.md) - [METU.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/METU.US.md) - [SSNGY.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SSNGY.US.md) - [MU.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/MU.US.md) - [GOOGL.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/GOOGL.US.md) - [GOOG.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/GOOG.US.md) - [NVDA.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/NVDA.US.md) - [OpenAI.NA](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/OpenAI.NA.md) - [SMSN.UK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SMSN.UK.md) - [NVD.DE](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/NVD.DE.md) - [SNDKV.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/SNDKV.US.md) ## Related News & Research - [Meta blames RAM shortage for $100 Quest 3 price hike](https://longbridge.com/en/news/283008550.md) - [Meta to raise Quest VR headset prices in US on rising component costs](https://longbridge.com/en/news/283025611.md) - [ADL warns Meta's rollback of content moderation allowed hate to fester](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282874394.md) - [Meta Platforms Stock (META) Sinks as VR Headset Prices Rise](https://longbridge.com/en/news/283041228.md) - [Meta Platforms, Inc. $META Shares Sold by Yousif Capital Management LLC](https://longbridge.com/en/news/282996902.md)