Niam Radia is now paying four times as much for RAM. He is also paying someone less to answer his phones.
The owner of GamerTech Toronto, a PC building and repair store in Vaughan, Ont, has watched memory chip prices surge over the past year while rolling out AI tools to handle work his staff used to do.
"We have an AI chatbot on our live chat that now handles all of the incoming live chat requests on our website, and only gets handed off to a human when required," Radia said. "Emails are often rewritten using AI to make them more polished, as that also requires less work from our customer support rep."
AI data centres run on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, built for the demands of machine learning. HBM and standard consumer RAM share the same production lines. For every bit of HBM manufactured, approximately three bits of conventional DRAM capacity are lost.
"This also ties into the RAM shortage caused by the increase in AI use, which has definitely caused a major market shift," Radia said. New chip capacity is expected to arrive in late 2027.
Three companies control between 93 and 95 per cent of global DRAM supply: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. SK Hynix's entire 2026 HBM allocation is fully committed to AI customers. DRAM prices surged 172 per cent throughout 2025. DDR5 spot prices quadrupled since September of that year. Contract prices rose 90 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the fourth quarter of 2025.
In February, SK Hynix Global Public Relations spokesperson Beomsun Sean Park said the company is accelerating production to meet surging demand. The company will "continue to make strategic investment decisions based on a comprehensive assessment of customers' mid-to-long-term demand," Park said.
The Yongin Cluster fab Phase 1 cleanroom opening has moved up three months, from May 2027 to February 2027. Park did not address when consumer supply conditions would ease.
Micron chief executive Sanjay Mehrotra has said shortage conditions will persist beyond 2026. Partial normalization is not expected until late 2027. Major PC manufacturers, including Dell, Lenovo and HP, have announced price increases of 15 to 20 per cent for 2026. Gartner projects entry-level laptops under US$500 will be financially unviable within two years.
Canada produces no memory chips. It absorbs price increases set by manufacturers elsewhere and has no leverage in the supply chain. A 25 per cent U.S. tariff on Canadian goods compounds the pressure. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has threatened 100 per cent tariffs on Samsung and SK Hynix unless they build them in the U.S. Those costs pass directly to consumers.
Radia has not cut staff. He has started using AI to build Shopify applications, replacing software his store was paying high monthly fees to use. But the customer-facing layer of the business runs differently now.
"Some of the roles have changed a little bit," Radia said. "We have less time spent on customer support, but we still need people like PC builders and repair technicians to run the store itself. We are still a small company, so we're not really looking at downsizing."
The share of Canadian businesses using AI to produce goods or deliver services doubled in a single year, from six per cent to 12 per cent between 2023 and 2025, according to Statistics Canada. The Conference Board of Canada found in 2024 that 57.4 per cent of Canadian jobs are highly exposed to AI-driven disruption.
Tahsin Mehdi, a senior research economist at Statistics Canada who co-authored the agency's key studies on AI occupational exposure, said the range of workers facing disruption is wide.
"Jobs involving clerical, coding, writing, and digital content creation are just some of the jobs potentially more vulnerable to AI," Mehdi said.
"There's a lot more going on in our economy than just AI," he said. "Competing economic forces, everything from the pandemic aftershocks to immigration, inflation, and tariffs, make it challenging to say whether the trends we're seeing now is being caused solely by AI or whether they reflect a culmination of economic forces."
Among businesses that adopted AI over the past year, only about six per cent reported reducing their workforce because of it. Four per cent said they increased employment. Mehdi said the more common shift may be harder to count.
"It's possible that AI may be reshaping tasks and workflows within jobs without actually eliminating them entirely, at least on a large scale," he said.
Ottawa announced a program in Budget 2025, called TechStat, to begin tracking how AI affects the labour force. It is not yet operational.
Canada is funding $2 billion in AI over five years. The government signed a $240-million deal with Toronto-based AI firm Cohere to deploy AI tools across the public service and plans to cut 40,000 federal positions, citing AI as a savings tool.
Radia said the gap he sees is not resistance to the technology, but a lack of information about what it can do.
"Companies either don't realize its full potential, or are too hesitant to start making big changes," he said. "Small business owners aren't being told about AI's real benefits and how they can directly assist with business operations. More training and educational content about how AI can be used to assist would definitely help out."
