Memory costs have more than quadrupled this year as manufacturers prioritize more lucrative high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for servers powering AI datacenters. Many enterprises are keeping equipment longer in an uncertain economy. Ben Caddy, senior analyst at Omdia, said suppliers were linking refresh discussions with opportunities to recover value from customers' aging kit.
By 2030, he predicted, 35 percent of "all the hardware sold for the channel will be taken back by partners," driven "by the sheer economic logic of taking equipment back, recovering value, and embracing more circular IT lifecycles." This is already helping some customers "unlock some capital to put towards those [relatively] small refresh plans," he said while hosting a panel on circular IT at last month's Canalys Forums in Barcelona. Refurbished smartphones are growing in popularity, but persuading customers to trade in their old devices remains a constraint on supply.
The same applies to PCs and other equipment, said Jon Sansom, MD at GreenSafe IT. "Availability is a challenge," he said.
