The chip shortage is spreading to power and management controller silicon, threatening server shipments as vendors prioritize capacity for higher-margin AI server products. Market watcher TrendForce has downgraded its server shipment grwoth forecast for the whole of 2026 from 20 percent to 13 percent due to extended lead times for multiple general server components. Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now READ MORE The memory chip supply crisis is familiar to Reg readers: manufacturers shifted capacity toward high-margin server DRAM and HBM for AI infrastructure, starving the market of standard DRAM and NAND and driving prices up . The "AI effect" is now spreading to server CPUs and even hard disk drives , as manufacturing capacity gets soaked up in satisfying the requirements of the biggest cloud providers. TrendForce says demand for general-purpose servers remains steady, however, lead times for some of these key components are stretching to nearly a year.…