Server prices up 125%. Lead times reaching 18 months.
Gartner's Jon Forest puts memory price rises at 50% to 200%, pushing PC prices up 35% to 45%.
Enterprise network equipment is up more than 20% this year, with another 3% to 5% expected going into 2027. Lead times for infrastructure that enterprise projects depend on now run nine to twelve months, and in some places eighteen.
Phillip Privett at TD SYNNEX has the sentence for your next budget meeting:
"Prices went up 40%, they may come down five. They're not going to come down 40%."
Matt Kimball at Moor Insights expects the shortage to last. AI inference demand runs longer and larger than the training wave that started it, and the market is expected to stay tight through the end of 2027.
Anyone costing an S/4HANA migration or a data centre refresh this quarter is using a hardware line written for a different market. Prices have moved one way.
What happens to your go-live date if the servers arrive a year late?
Sources
Our file on Gartner
- 10 Sept
Gartner said vendors call AI agents employees for one reason. Headcount budgets are bigger.
- 10 Sept
Gartner says a third of AI job cuts will reverse. Rehiring costs more.
For your next steering committee
- 1Ask when each major software contract renews and what notice period applies.
- 2Ask which price protections are written into the contract and which rest on a sales conversation.
- 3Ask what a price rise on that line would do to the run budget, and who would notice it first.
Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01
Welcome back. · Issue 01