Reporter: Song Jianan
Amazon has quietly raised prices on several of its own hardware products recently, from e-readers and smart speakers to streaming TV sticks and whole-home mesh routers. Some entry-level models have seen price hikes of up to 60%. The company is now the latest tech giant to pass supply chain costs on to everyday consumers amid the ongoing memory chip price surge.
The price adjustments cover Amazon’s four main hardware lineups geared toward everyday family use. The Echo series of smart speakers serves as the gateway to Amazon’s smart home ecosystem. The entry-level Echo Dot, its biggest seller by volume, has gone from $49.99 to $79.99 — a straight $30 jump and a 60% increase, making it the steepest hike across the entire lineup.
The Echo Show 11 with its built-in screen now retails at $249.99, up from $219.99 — an increase of roughly 13.6%.
As the most recognized e-reader brand in the world, the entire Kindle lineup has also gone up. The 16GB base model Kindle, previously $109.99, now sells for $149.99 — a $40 increase, or 36.4%. The 16GB Kindle Paperwhite has climbed from $159.99 to $199.99, a 25% bump.
The Fire TV streaming devices have followed suit. The Fire TV Stick HD saw a modest $5 increase, moving from $34.99 to $39.99. The more powerful Fire TV Stick 4K Max jumped from $59.99 to $84.99 — a rise of over 41%. The premium Fire TV Cube set-top box has also gone up by $60.
Amazon’s Eero mesh routers, designed for whole-home Wi-Fi coverage, have also been repriced. The Eero 7 three-pack now costs $399.99, up from $349.99. The high-end Eero Pro 7 three-pack took a $100 hit, climbing from $699.99 to $799.99. Notably, the Ring security camera line, which is also part of Amazon’s smart home hardware family, was left out of this round of increases.
Explaining the price moves, Kristy Schmidt, Senior Manager at Amazon’s Devices and Services division, said, “The consumer electronics industry is facing significantly higher costs for memory and storage components. After absorbing these cost increases for as long as possible, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines.” Schmidt emphasized that Amazon will continue to offer promotional deals throughout the year.
Behind Amazon’s across-the-board hardware price hikes lies a structural supply-demand imbalance in the global memory chip market. With the explosive growth in AI model training and inference workloads, a large portion of memory production capacity has shifted toward high-margin server-grade DRAM and NAND flash, leaving the supply of mature chips for consumer electronics increasingly tight.
According to TrendForce data, contract prices for commodity DRAM rose 93%–98% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, while NAND flash contract prices climbed 55%–60%. In Q2, DRAM contract prices continued upward by another 58%–63%, and NAND flash saw its quarter-over-quarter increase widen to 70%–75%.
Multiple research firms believe the upward trend in memory chip prices won’t ease quickly in the second half of the year. Significant new production capacity from chipmakers isn’t expected to hit the market until at least the second half of 2027, meaning cost pressure on consumer electronics manufacturers will persist.
For Amazon, its hardware business has long been about driving ecosystem adoption rather than chasing hardware profits. As reported by Global Times, Amazon’s devices division racked up losses of $25 billion between 2017 and 2021. In 2022 alone, the Echo speaker division reportedly lost $10 billion. Since then, Echo, Kindle, and Fire TV products have primarily served to boost user engagement with Prime subscriptions, digital books, streaming, and smart home services, relying on downstream software and service revenue to offset the margin sacrifice on hardware.
Amazon’s other core businesses, meanwhile, are growing fast. According to its Q2 2026 earnings report, total company revenue reached $200.6 billion, up 20% year-over-year. AWS cloud revenue hit $42.2 billion, surging 37% — its fastest growth in 18 quarters. The AI server business consumes vast amounts of memory chips, and Amazon’s own cloud operations are intensifying global competition for storage chip supply.
Looking across the consumer electronics industry, Amazon is hardly the first company to raise prices due to rising storage costs. Before this, both Apple and Microsoft had already increased prices on certain hardware products because of memory component cost pressure. On August 24, renowned tech journalist Mark Gurman reported that Apple is planning to raise prices on its iPhone 18 series launching in September, driven by tight memory and chip supply pushing up overall component costs — making a price increase all but certain.
TrendForce notes that the DRAM supply-demand gap in 2026 is projected to land between -1% and -2%. By 2027, as demand growth outpaces supply expansion, that gap is expected to widen further. However, major CSP (cloud service provider) capital expenditures are expected to remain at historical highs in 2026. If memory prices stay elevated in 2027, they will take up a larger share of overall CSP capex. Whether that affects 2027 capex planning — and memory purchasing decisions — remains to be seen.
As for NAND, TrendForce indicates that in 2027, as manufacturers accelerate upgrades to higher-layer-count products and new fab capacity gradually comes online, bit supply growth is expected to surpass 2026 levels, leading to a significant expansion in market output.
