Nothing just canceled a phone. Not delayed, not “rethinking the timeline”: the CMF Phone 3 Pro is dead, and co-founder Akis Evangelidis is pointing at the same thing everyone in this industry has been pointing at since spring: memory prices that have gone up nearly fourfold since September 2025. The company is also cutting an unspecified number of jobs and quietly standing up a new AI unit, though nobody at Nothing is saying yet what that unit actually does.

I’ve been tracking this RAM story for a couple of weeks now, and the CMF cancellation is a different kind of casualty than what came before it. Samsung went first, quietly tacking $100 onto every foldable at Unpacked. Qualcomm was blunter about it: chip prices are going up by double digits for anything shipped after September 1st, full stop, because the company says it has exhausted its ability to absorb higher supplier costs. A price hike stings, but it’s a rounding error next to what just happened at Nothing. Canceling a phone means somebody ran the spreadsheet and the number came back negative no matter how the margin got adjusted.

CMF was supposed to be the value play, Nothing’s cheap and cheerful sub-brand that spun out with its own India headquarters and a $100 million manufacturing joint venture less than a year ago. A sub-brand built on thin margins is exactly the kind of product a fourfold jump in memory costs kills first, because there’s no pricing room left to absorb it and no premium buyer willing to eat the difference. Nothing’s mainline phones have more room to pass costs along, the same negotiating muscle that got the company out of its old Qualcomm supply dependency in the first place. CMF never had that muscle to begin with.

Google is telling the same story with a straighter face. VP of Devices Shakil Barkat went on record this week saying RAM has gone from $2.80 a gigabyte a year ago to $12 now, citing Morgan Stanley’s numbers, and that the economics have “fundamentally shifted” ahead of the Pixel 11 launch on August 12th. The leaked spec sheet already shows the entry Pixel trimmed to 12GB from 16GB, with extra storage thrown in as a consolation prize. Google is also promising to aggressively engineer Android to need less memory, which is the kind of sentence a company reaches for when it doesn’t have a better plan yet, and I don’t buy that software alone fixes a hardware economics problem this size.

Even Valve isn’t spared, and Valve doesn’t make phones. The Steam Frame headset runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with 16GB of LPDDR5X, so Qualcomm’s September price hike lands directly on a product Valve already delayed once because it couldn’t lock in a retail price during the shortage. Virtually every AR and VR headset on the market runs Qualcomm silicon, as one hardware leaker put it bluntly online this weekend, and there’s no dodging the exposure this generation.

What makes this structural rather than a bad quarter for one company is that Samsung sits on both sides of the same trade. Samsung sells the memory driving these prices up, and Samsung sells the phones absorbing the cost, which made its own $100 foldable bump the strangest version of this story: a company effectively charging itself more and passing the bill to its own customers. Down in Hefei, CXMT is racing to become China’s answer to Samsung and SK Hynix, and it’s AI datacenter demand, not smartphone makers, pulling supply away from consumer devices in the first place. Phones are competing with GPU racks for the same DRAM lines, and phones are losing that fight.

I don’t think this stops at one canceled CMF phone. If a fourfold cost increase was enough to kill a product that already had India manufacturing lined up and a market waiting for it, there are other sub-brand SKUs across the industry sitting on the same knife-edge, most of which haven’t had their earnings call yet. The part I keep turning over is whether this pushes challenger brands to cut RAM further instead of cutting products entirely, the way Google is now threatening to engineer Android down to survive on less memory. That’s a much riskier bet than tacking $100 onto a price tag, and nobody’s proven it works yet.

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