HP (HPQ), Asus (2357 TT) and Acer (2353 TT) are shifting some PC production from Thailand and Vietnam back to China to combat soaring component costs driven by AI-related memory and storage shortages, reports Nikkei citing sources

HP (HPQ), Asus (2357 TT) and Acer (2353 TT) are shifting some PC production from Thailand and Vietnam back to China to combat soaring component costs driven by AI-related memory and storage shortages, reports Nikkei citing sources.

Supply chain relocation decisions of this kind are normally framed as diversification away from China, a pattern established under tariff pressure and pandemic-era disruption, so a deliberate move in the opposite direction is notable for what it implies about the binding constraint: component cost, not trade policy. When memory and storage markets tighten, the historical pattern is that contract pricing and allocation concentrate among suppliers with deep China-based ecosystems, and OEMs gravitate toward proximity to component vendors and substrate capacity to defend bill-of-materials margins. The peer set matters here: HP, Asus and Acer share the same DRAM, NAND and SSD supply base, so parallel moves by all three suggest an industry-wide cost squeeze rather than a company-specific sourcing issue. Tightness in memory has historically been driven by capacity reallocation toward high-margin AI demand, and in past cycles OEM response has ranged from raising PC list prices to accepting margin compression, with the former more common where shortages are expected to persist. The tells worth tracking are memory contract price trajectory, commentary from the major memory producers on capacity allocation, and whether peers such as Dell and Lenovo signal the same resourcing logic in upcoming calls.