CBTS Introduces Hardware Buy & Hold Program to Help Organizations Lock in Infrastructure Pricing Before Costs Climb

New managed inventory offering lets organizations separate the decision to buy from the decision to deploy — reducing price and supply chain exposure in a volatile hardware market

CINCINNATI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CBTS, a leading North American technology services company, today introduced its Hardware Buy & Hold Program, a managed inventory offering that enables organizations to purchase infrastructure at today’s price and take delivery when their project is ready. The program is designed to help organizations reduce price exposure, plan around supply chain lead times, and secure inventory before deployment timelines are finalized.

According to Forrester Research, organizations face 20% cost uplift above historical norms for AI-optimized infrastructure.¹ The Hardware Buy & Hold Program reflects what CBTS is seeing across the technology market: tariffs, trade policy shifts, supply chain instability, and AI-related infrastructure demand are making hardware costs and delivery times harder to predict. The result is shorter quote validity, less certainty in long-range cost planning, and more financial risk for teams that wait until deployment is imminent to purchase infrastructure.

The problem: Budgets are approved. Pricing changes, again.

The new solution from CBTS addresses a growing challenge for enterprise IT and procurement leaders: Approved budgets and deployment timelines are increasingly misaligned with hardware pricing. For organizations planning memory- and storage-intensive infrastructure, even a short delay between budget approval and delivery can materially change project cost. With the CBTS Hardware Buy & Hold Program, clients can purchase eligible hardware at today’s locked price subject to the program’s terms, have CBTS hold it in inventory, and take delivery when their project is ready.

CBTS is launching the program with a focus on server and storage configurations, where recent pricing pressure has been especially acute. In internal market tracking, CBTS saw 64GB RDIMM memory prices rise 142% in four months, server controllers rise 92%, and EPYC CPUs rise 53%. In one like-for-like comparison, a 10-node cluster increased 115%. Across the dataset, quotes expired within 10 to 14 days.

“Many organizations have approved budget, but not a deployment window they fully control,” said Justin Rice, Chief Product and Technology Officer at CBTS. “That gap has become one of the biggest controllable costs in enterprise hardware procurement. This program gives clients a way to separate the decision to buy from the decision to deploy, so they can reduce price exposure without forcing project timelines.”

How it works

Under the program, CBTS works with clients to identify upcoming infrastructure purchases that are likely to face timeline drag or component volatility. Clients buy at the current price, CBTS holds the hardware until the agreed delivery window, and the carrying cost remains predictable throughout the holding period. For organizations that know they will need the infrastructure but are not yet ready to receive or deploy it, the program provides a more disciplined procurement strategy than absorbing repeated repricing.

Availability

The CBTS Hardware Buy & Hold Program is being previewed now with select clients in the United States. For more information, visit our blog.

¹ Stephanie Balaouras, Lauren Nelson, Jinan Budge, and Mark Moccia, "Geopolitical Conflict Increases IT Budget Scrutiny And Security Risks: Double Down On Spend Management And Resilience," Forrester Research, Inc., March 19, 2026.