Kelt Reeves has sold high-end personal computers for 34 years, catering to gamers and others who are willing to pay $4,000 and more for extreme performance.

His company, Falcon Northwest, builds these systems to order using powerful computer chips, particularly a variety known as random-access memory, or RAM, which hold data temporarily while other chips crunch numbers and display graphics.

But as OpenAI, Meta, Google and other tech giants battle to win the artificial intelligence race, they have also demanded more memory chips for the data centers they are building to power the technology. Since late summer, Mr. Reeves has been grappling with a tripling of the cost of memory chips, pushing Falcon Northwest to raise the price of some of its popular high-end computers to more than $7,000 from about $5,800.

“This isn’t a consumer-driven bubble,” Mr. Reeves, 55, said. “Nobody is expecting this to be a quick blip that’s going to be over with.”

The crunch in memory chips is the latest domino effect from the A.I. frenzy, which has upended Silicon Valley and lifted the fortunes of A.I. chip makers like Nvidia. The boom has now gone beyond A.I. chips to reach other components used to build gadgets, which could ultimately affect the prices of mass-market personal computers and smartphones, too.