New Delhi, Oct. 15 -- The global semiconductor market is seeing an unusual surge in prices. Galloping AI demand, tight supplies of memory chips, and capacity shifts toward high-bandwidth memory are pushing up costs for smartphones, laptops and servers, leading to a chipflation. How long will it last? Mint explains.

Semiconductor prices are soaring as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has created an insatiable appetite for data center infrastructure, a large consumer of high-end chips. Major global suppliers, including Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix, have diverted standard wafer production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and enterprise SSDs or solid state devices, for storage.

This has starved the consumer electronics marke...