The tech challenges of 2026, smartly brought to you by AI

Pricier devices, weirder ways of working and an exploitative data economy - all of these await us. By Lindsey Schutters

- Lindsey Schutters

Young South Africans are being employed to label images and moderate content for little money.

(Photos: iStock and Vecteezy)

Microsoft is betting on efficiency by moving processing power from the cloud to the device in your backpack.

John Press, Microsoft Surface business unit head at Core, frames the modern laptop enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) as a three-in-one value proposition. “It’s an education tool. It’s a business tool. And it’s quite frankly an entertainment tool all wrapped into one,” he says.

But although Press paints a picture of seamless productivity driven by a device's neural processing unit (NPU), the reality of 2026 is biting back. For the average South African consumer and chief information officer (CIO), this dependency is arriving at the worst possible time, as the physical hardware required to run these AI tools is entering a crisis of scarcity.

A global shortage of memory chips, driven by manufacturers pivoting to build high-margin AI server chips, has sent prices skyrocketing. In late 2025, consumer solid state drive (SSD) prices rose 50% and RAM prices effectively doubled.

“You actually have guys who built gaming PCs this year stripping out and selling their GPUs and DDR5 memory for higher prices than they paid for it months ago,” said a store clerk at Computer Mania, referring to the graphics processing units and latest generation of high-speed computer memory.

For CIOs, this is a procurement nightmare, and they can expect a sticker shock of 20% to 30% on the next fleet of laptops. For the average consumer, the implications are dire too. The dream of the cheap but good smartphone is basically dead. The International Data Corporation estimates that the cost of smart devices will rise by an estimated $70 per unit because of the memory market crunch.