A quarterly revenue of $147 billion—DRAM market is going wild—but what truly matters isn’t the price.

Core logic: AI is 'siphoning off' everything. According to SemiAnalysis data, AI data centers now absorb approximately 70% of global memory output. Producing one HBM4 wafer consumes roughly the same capacity as producing four standard DDR wafers. As the three major DRAM manufacturers shift more and more production lines toward HBM, the supply of general-purpose DRAM for smartphones, PCs, automobiles, and industrial control systems inevitably tightens. Jeff Clarke, Dell’s Vice Chairman and COO, was asked during the latest earnings call, “What is currently the biggest supply constraint?” His answer was strikingly blunt: “DRAM, DRAM, DRAM—followed by NAND, NAND, NAND.” Even Google has reached its breaking point. Nikhil Cherian, Google’s Senior Director of Supply Chain Infrastructure, publicly stated that Google has begun dismantling retired servers to reclaim DDR4 memory modules and reinstall them into AI servers—“yet even this is insufficient.” He urged memory vendors to rapidly expand production, noting that “AI processors representing billions of dollars in investment will sit idle due to insufficient memory bandwidth—a colossal waste of computational investment.” When a customer of Google’s scale starts salvaging memory modules from decommissioned servers, you know the supply-demand imbalance has reached an extreme. Price trajectory Connecting the quarterly sequential changes in DRAM contract prices reveals the intensity of this cycle: Quarter DRAM Contract Price QoQ Change 2025 Q3 +10%–15% 2025 Q4 +18%–23% 2026 Q1 +93%–98% 2026 Q2 +58%–63% 2026 Q3 (forecast) +13%–18% 2026 Q4 (forecast) Single-digit The +93%–98% quarterly surge in Q1 2026 marks the steepest single-quarter price spike ever recorded in the memory industry over the past four decades. Cumulatively, a contract buyer’s payment in mid-2026 is roughly triple the price at end-2025—and four to five times higher than the level in mid-2025. Consumer-side increases are even more staggering: DDR5 16GB retail prices surged from around ¥450 in 2025 to over ¥1,800; 32GB kits approach ¥4,000. 1TB SSDs rose from ¥410 to ¥950. Some specific DDR4 models posted year-on-year increases as high as 2,352%. Why prices won’t fall immediately Three reasons: 1. The three giants have already sold out their entire 2026 production capacity—mostly locked in multi-year long-term agreements. Micron signed 16 Supply Commitment Agreements (SCAs); Samsung entered into five-year rolling long-term agreements with five major cloud providers; SK hynix secured multi-year Long-Term Agreements (LTAs) with about ten key customers. It’s not a matter of wanting to buy more—it’s that there’s simply no inventory left. 2. Newly added capacity won’t begin ramping until late 2027 at the earliest. SK hynix’s first cleanroom at its Yongin Y1 facility will only come online in February 2027; its Indiana plant won’t enter mass production until 2028; its Cheongju M17 fab—requiring a KRW 80 trillion investment—won’t start operations until 2029. Samsung’s and Dalian’s new fabs are also scheduled for 2027–2029. This means no meaningful supply increase is expected for at least the next 12–18 months. 3. HBM’s encroachment on general-purpose DRAM capacity is intensifying—not easing. NVIDIA has revived its Rubin CPX project, replacing GDDR7 with 168GB HBM4. Demand for HBM doubles with each new generation of AI chips—and every additional HBM die produced displaces several general-purpose DRAM dies.

TrendForce: DRAM industry revenue up 59.5% QoQ in Q2 2026, though supply expansion still lags demand growth.

According to the latest memory industry research from TrendForce Consulting, DRAM industry revenue surged 59.5% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to approximately $154.73 billion in Q2 2026, driven primarily by significant price increases in conventional DRAM contract pricing. Surging demand for AI servers—fueled by large language model (LLM) training and AI inference—has simultaneously boosted shipments of HBM3e, LPDDR5X, and high-capacity RDIMMs. Meanwhile, agentic AI applications are driving demand across all RDIMM capacity tiers. On the supply side, memory manufacturers’ inventories remain at historic lows, and newly added capacity is prioritized for server applications; overall DRAM bit shipments thus grew modestly in Q2. Looking ahead to Q3 revenue drivers: bit shipments are expected to continue rising slightly, while pricing momentum will moderate. Demand for high-capacity RDIMMs is shifting toward mid- and low-capacity variants, and PC and smartphone customers’ tolerance for further price hikes remains limited. Conventional DRAM prices are forecast to rise only 13–18% QoQ, with the highest涨幅 observed in consumer DRAM—where manufacturers are significantly constraining supply. TrendForce Consulting notes that Samsung ranked first among the three major DRAM suppliers in Q2 bit shipment growth, owing to its early adoption and shipment of HBM4. Its average selling price (ASP) also rose substantially, lifting quarterly revenue to $60.98 billion—a 63.4% QoQ increase—and securing a 39.4% market share. SK hynix ranked second in revenue, with Q2 revenue rising 37.9% QoQ to $38.59 billion. However, its ASP growth was comparatively constrained, as HBM accounted for the highest proportion of total bit shipments among the three major suppliers. Its market share edged down slightly to 24.9%.

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