Component Shortage: Why AI is Driving Up Prices (And How Speechi is Fighting Back)

Tim Cook said, “This is a hundred-year flood,” a phrase that resonates with every Tech product and marketing team facing the global shortage of memory and storage chips. The conclusion seems mathematical: price increases are inevitable.

In his interview with The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook stated he hasn’t seen anything like this in 40 years, and we share his assessment. Prices have been skyrocketing ever since AI servers began multiplying; as a result, an electronic component that was once among the cheapest has become an ultra-coveted resource. Priority is given to major buyers of AI and Cloud solutions, who are in a position to secure long-term agreements. Meanwhile, traditional buyers—including ourselves—are left fighting over the remaining resources.

For consumer products (smartphones, tablets, and PCs) as well as products destined for schools and businesses (including IFPDs), it is crucial that component prices return to reasonable levels. In recent years, IFPD prices had dropped by about 30%. Today, the component crisis is set to sharply reverse this trend.

With the shortage looking likely to last until 2027, should we just resign ourselves to it?

The Chip Paradox: Artificial vs. Human Intelligence

There is a certain irony in the current crisis: it is the race for artificial intelligence that is making it harder to access the tools of human intelligence—the kind exercised daily in classrooms, lecture halls, and meeting rooms.

Yet, while we cannot dictate the rules of the silicon market, we maintain total control over our core business: design. Faced with a dwindling resource, the challenge is no longer about buying in bulk, but about designing smarter—because we are far from taking a categorically anti-AI stance.

Our Shield? Engineering and Sustainability

Rather than rushing headlong into accepting blind price increases, we have activated three levers to protect our users:

• Shifting the Value Proposition: In a market marked by the continuous rise in electronic component costs, true differentiation now lies in usage. This is why Speechi has been investing for several years in developing its software and cloud ecosystem. With Speechi Connect, we continuously enrich the user experience, simplify fleet management, and deploy new services without depending exclusively on hardware renewal cycles. Innovation is no longer limited to what is inside the screen; it extends to the entire environment that accompanies it.

• The Power of Sustainability: With our after-sales service based in Halluin (Northern France) and the design of a software ecosystem that evolves even on older models, we do everything we can to make our IFPDs last over time, ensuring they remain a sustainable and profitable investment (fewer than 2% of Speechi screens ever return to our warehouse, and we boast a repairability index of 9.5/10). Discover our CSR approach to driving responsible and inclusive innovation.

• Sanctualizing Our Stocks: We have strengthened ties with our long-standing partners to smooth out market fluctuations and absorb the initial shockwave internally before it impacts our customers’ budgets—even if, in all transparency, some impact is inevitable. In our industry, the temptation during turbulent times is often to resort to “aggressive clearance sales” to keep warehouses moving. We refuse to do this, out of respect for our teams, our customers, and the value we create.

The tide is rising, that is a fact. But the value of an IFPD will never be measured by the price of a memory chip (which no one ever thinks about) on the Taipei Stock Exchange; it is measured by the quality of how you use it. We are holding the line, and we thank our many high-quality partners who are holding it with us.