The AI boom is making laptops and tablets more expensive. Could refurbished tech retailers be the biggest winner?

Over recent years, the demand for artificial intelligence has skyrocketed – impacting everything from text and image generation to agentic forecasting. However, over the past few months, the surge in popularity for AI has begun to reshape an unlikely corner of the retail market.
As technology companies race to build AI data centres, the industry has found that the memory chips needed to power them are becoming increasingly scarce, driving up the cost of everything from laptops to tablets.