Your company’s Dell laptops are about to cost more.
Starting December 17, the computer maker is set to hike prices across its commercial product lines, according to an internal list of upcoming price changes sent to staff on December 9 and seen by Business Insider.
The list outlines price hikes for Dell’s commercial business — meaning its sales to corporate clients rather than individual consumers. The commercial business accounts for about 85% of Dell’s annual revenue in the Client Solutions Group (CSG), the division that sells laptops and PCs, according to its latest annual results.
The company is one of the leading providers of computer hardware to US companies, and prices aren’t just rising at Dell. An industry-wide shortage of memory and storage chips is driving up costs across the PC industry, affecting competitors like Lenovo and HP as well.
The soaring demand for AI infrastructure has tech companies snapping up enormous quantities of memory and storage chips, increasing competition for consumer devices.
A Dell spokesperson told Business Insider that “like others in the industry, Dell takes targeted pricing action, when necessary, while maintaining supply continuity and its commitment to customer value.”
“Our supply chain is resilient and globally diverse. It’s designed to offer the needed flexibility when navigating macroeconomic, regulatory and trade dynamics,” the spokesperson said.
What the price rises mean for you
How much more expensive a laptop at Dell will be next week depends on how much memory and storage you require.
The global shortages are hitting two key types of chips that are essential components in most user devices: DRAM and NAND.
When you buy a laptop, DRAM — dynamic random-access memory — is the memory, usually 8GB to 32GB for an average customer. NAND — non-volatile flash memory — is used for SSD storage, typically around 512GB or 1TB.
From next week, Dell Pro and Pro Max notebooks and desktops with 32GB of memory will cost between $130 and $230 more, according to the list of price changes seen by Business Insider. If opting for the top-of-the-range 128GB memory, the price is set to rise by between $520 and $765 per device.
Selecting a laptop with 1 TB of storage will add to the overall cost by between $55 and $135.
An employee at Dell who works in sales said the percentage increase would be “between 10% and 30%” depending on the contract. They asked to remain anonymous as they are not permitted to speak publicly, but Business Insider has verified their employment.
Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The price list also includes price hikes for AI laptops containing Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and individual monitors. For example, a Dell Pro 55 Plus 4K Monitor, currently listed on Dell’s website at $1,349.99, will be $150 more expensive, according to the price list.
AI laptops containing an Nvidia RTX PRO 500 Blackwell GPU with 6GB will become $66 more expensive, and a 24GB GPU will cost $530 more, the pricing chart shows.
“It’s impacting everyone, and there’s no way around it currently, so customers will just have to pay more if they want the products,” the sales employee said.
How Dell told its sellers to prepare
Higher prices make for a tougher sell, already a challenge for sales teams amid today’s tariff-weary consumers and enterprises.
Dell sent an email to its “go-to-market” (GTM) sales staff on November 25, which Business Insider has seen, outlining the “critical next steps” sellers should take to prepare ahead of the increase.
“Global memory and storage supply are tightening fast,” Dell warned GTM team members.
The price of contracts for DRAM and NAND chips has “already risen significantly this quarter, and suppliers are signaling further increases and allocation constraints driven by AI demand,” Dell said in the email.
The company told its sellers to “move decisively” ahead of the price increases to “protect value for our customers and for Dell.”
The email advised teams to engage with top accounts in the coming week, close deals, and plan significant opportunities and multi-quarter deals to protect the sales pipeline.
“Ordering today for future delivery DOES NOT lock in current pricing,” Dell warned, but said that acting now would help customers stay ahead of “significant anticipated memory increase.”
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The Dell sales employee said that there had been an initial rush to help customers buy remaining inventory, but now the situation is largely viewed as “out of our control.”
The employee said Dell was also absorbing some of the costs internally, through hits to margins and limiting discounts that sales staff can offer.
In the company’s third-quarter earnings call on November 25, Jeff Clarke, Dell’s COO and vice chairman, said the market’s price increases were “unprecedented.”
“We have not seen costs move at the rate that we’ve seen,” Clarke said. “Demand is way ahead of supply. And as we wade our way through that, we’re going to lean on the things that we’ve always done.”
Why is there a chip shortage?
Tech companies are buying massive amounts of DRAM and NAND to power AI models and cloud services, leaving fewer chips for consumer devices.
Combined with global supply-chain tensions, the explosion in demand has prompted the three companies that dominate the DRAM market — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — to raise their prices.
DRAM prices are expected to rise 30% in the final quarter of 2025, having already increased by 50% so far this year, according to Counterpoint, a global technology market research firm.
“The entire supply chain simply can’t meet the demand that is now required and that inevitably leads to these kinds of challenges,” Bob O’Donnell, the president and chief analyst at Technalysis Research, told Business Insider.
These price increases will “likely have a noticeable impact for all types of PCs from every PC vendor,” said O’Donnell, adding that the supply shortage is expected to continue throughout 2026.
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