Looking back in time is always interesting, especially when visiting any topic that's technology-adjacent — and doubly so when looking at the evolution of pricing. The price of memory continues to be a hot-button topic, and an eagle-eyed Redditor came across a 1995 press release from Advantage Memory Corporation announcing prices for its freshly released DIMMs, revealing that fitting a high-end machine with 1 GB of RAM would set you back as much as a cheap house.

The figures on display are rather shocking when converted to today's dollars, with 8 MB of RAM going for $399, or $874 in today's money, and a 64 MB stick ringing in at $3,900, or $8,540 in 2026. The Apple Power Macintosh mentioned in the PR had 12 slots, so it could fit in as much as 1.5 GB of RAM, and although the pricing for 128 MB DIMMs wasn't mentioned, those would be around $8,000 a pop, so "only" 1 GB of RAM would come in at $64,000 — enough for a house back then in the more affordable areas of the U.S. By the way, that amount would be $140,000 today.

In 1995, memory technology was transitioning from SIMMs to the spankin' new DIMMs, and Command and Conquer, MechWarrior 2, and the original Need for Speed were coming out. 16 MB of RAM was generally accepted as a decent amount of memory for a build, roughly matching the 16 GB of today. Some quick math says those 16 MB of the new technology were about $800, or in today's money, the princely sum of $1,751.

As of today, 16 GB of DDR5 will set you back $200 to $250, but the price of memory has been extremely volatile, to say the least. Plus, not only is supply rumored to drop, server RAM contract prices are expected to rise, and the few crumbs left for the consumer market are still rising in price.

SK hynix chairman Chey Tae-won even suggested that DRAM wafer shortages could last until 2030 at least. The fact that all the major RAM makers are shifting their production lines to HBM for AI accelerators is only making the problem worse. Yes, $200 is still a long way from $1,750, but with things keeping in this direction, there's a non-zero chance this very article will be linked to in the near future.

At any rate, despite the poor outlook, these figures reveal just how much technology really became democratized with time. Any form of PC was really expensive back in 1995. Around that era, Bill Gates said that there would be "a PC at every home, and at every desk." That statement sounded a little insane back then, but in retrospect wasn't crazy enough, as today we have what would be sci-fi hardware... in everyone's pocket or purse.

Bad bots account for 91% of the traffic reaching one retailer's DDR5 memory product pages, roughly 10 automated requests for every legitimate visit, according to a LinkedIn post this week from Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at bot-mitigation firm DataDome. The figure updates research DataDome published in March, which measured the ratio at about 6:1 across several e-commerce sites.

Over the same period, the cheapest 128GB DDR5-6400 kit tracked by Tom's Hardware has reached $3,399, ten times its record low pricing. The Thales 2026 Bad Bot Report puts bad bots at 40% of all web traffic, less than half the share Segura reports on DDR5 listings.

DataDome's March report documented a single operation that generated more than 10 million blocked requests, with a one-hour sample showing 91 DDR5 listings each polled around 551 times, or once every 6.5 seconds. The requests carried cache-busting parameters to defeat cached stock data and targeted industrial module makers such as Micron and Apacer, as well as DIMM socket suppliers Amphenol and TE Connectivity, alongside consumer brands.

Segura wrote on LinkedIn that retailers carrying memory should assume their "traffic analytics are probably understating the problem significantly."

Keep in mind that the 91% figure comes from one unnamed retailer, and DataDome hasn't published a sample window or its methodology. DataDome also sells the product that blocks this traffic, and page requests ultimately aren't purchases, so the ratio measures monitoring pressure on listings rather than how much stock bots actually end up securing, which can’t easily be quantified.

Apacer CEO C.K. Chang said in July that DRAM supply to independent module makers could fall to 30% of 2026 levels next year, and TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise another 13% to 18% in Q3 after roughly 60% in Q2. Hyperscale buyers have reportedly placed deposits against most of 2027's DRAM output.

A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that averaged $72 this time last year now averages $392 on PCPartPicker. While graphics card and console scalping in 2020 and 2021 ran against scheduled restocks that eventually outpaced resale demand, no equivalent restock date exists for consumer DDR5 before 2027 at the earliest.

Framework stopped selling standalone RAM in November last year, citing scalpers, and Micro Center sells its CPU, motherboard, and 32GB DDR5 bundles in-store only with a one-per-household limit. Newegg and Amazon have run repeated CPU-plus-memory bundles that price a 32GB kit well below its standalone cost, which ties each kit to a processor a reseller then has to move as well. On eBay, we found G.Skill's Trident Z5 Neo 32GB kit listed at $836.54 in December against a $429.99 retail price, roughly double, and about seven times the $117.99 it sold for before the shortage.

Pine64 has stopped producing Linux devices entirely, announcing this week on its official Telegram news channel that "there isn't [sic] any plans to continue producing more Linux devices in the near future" because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. The stoppage covers the company's full lineup of Arm and RISC-V single-board computers, the PinePhone family, the PineTab2 tablet, and the PineNote e-reader, with remaining PineNote and PineTab2 stock estimated to last around three months.

Microcontroller-based products, such as the PineTime smartwatch, PineVoice smart speaker, and Pinecil soldering iron, won't be affected, and production will continue as usual. Development on the upcoming PineTime Pro will also continue: Pine64 said its demo firmware now has basic drivers for the display, touch, motion sensing, GPS, and audio, though some issues need fixing before a pilot batch enters production. The company also hasn't ended software support for existing Linux hardware.

The AI-driven memory crunch has raised prices on everything from DDR5 kits — which have sold on eBay for more than $2,000 — to prebuilt PCs from Dell, CyberPowerPC, and Maingear. Unfortunately, Pine64 buys the single worst-supplied part in the entire NAND market. TrendForce reported in April that the eMMC/UFS segment faces the tightest supply gap of any NAND category, because its production capacity overlaps with far higher-margin enterprise SSDs, making it the last in line for supplier allocation.

Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua said in February that 8GB eMMC modules had risen from $1.50 to $20 in a year, a 13-fold increase, and warned the shortage could shut down entire consumer electronics companies in 2026. Pine64 hasn't shut down, but a whole product category has, and it's the first named vendor to kill a lineup outright instead of repricing it.

Other small-board makers have taken the opposite route. Raspberry Pi has raised prices repeatedly, pushing the Pi 5 16GB to $205 and the 500+ to $410, while launching a 3GB Pi 4 and leaning on a stockpile of older LPDDR2 to hold prices on legacy boards. Framework followed in January, raising its desktop pricing to cover LPDDR5x costs, which, since Strix Halo boards use soldered RAM, it couldn't pass to users any other way.

Pine64 sells its hardware near cost as a community service, so it has no margin to absorb higher component prices and, evidently, believes its buyers won't, either. Its mid-2027 checkpoint aligns with supply forecasts that don't expect new memory fab capacity to arrive in volume before late 2027 or 2028.

Pine64 said any decision on resuming production depends on component pricing after mid-2027, meaning its Linux hardware could be off the market for two years — or more.

Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) shipped 14% of the world's NAND flash in the second quarter of 2026, entering the global top three for the first time and narrowly displacing Kioxia, according to Counterpoint Research's Memory & Storage Tracker published today. Samsung led with 25%, SK hynix followed at 22%, and Micron rounded out the top five. The Chinese vendor's climb comes during a quarter when enterprise SSDs absorbed 48% of every NAND bit shipped worldwide, up from 26% a year earlier, and industry revenue grew fivefold year over year by Counterpoint's count.

In terms of revenue, however, YMTC sits fifth behind both Kioxia and Micron, with nearly all of its output going into consumer products. Consumer bits now sell for a fraction of what hyperscaler buyers pay for enterprise eSSDs holding KV caches and inference datasets. The company has been included on the U.S. Entity List since December 2022, which bars it from achieving Western server qualification, where the big bucks are earned, limiting its addressable market to the Chinese domestic channel plus whatever consumer demand the incumbents leave behind.

They're leaving behind plenty — Samsung's shipment share has dropped from 32% in Q2 2024 to 25% as it caps NAND output in favor of higher-margin DRAM, SK hynix subsidiary Solidigm grew bit shipments 40% quarter over quarter on server demand, and Kioxia's entire 2026 production is already sold out, largely to enterprise customers. Kioxia itself sends over 30% of its bits into servers, per Counterpoint, but its customers pulled back as prices climbed, and slower growth cost it the number three spot it held a quarter earlier.

With NAND contract prices up roughly 75% in Q2 alone, the vacuum in the consumer channel is a segment that YMTC is perfectly set up to serve. The company grew shipments 22% year over year and 5% sequentially while mass-producing 267-layer 3D NAND on its Xtacking architecture, with development underway on devices exceeding 300 layers. Meanwhile, its third Wuhan fab has cleared Beijing's 50% domestic-tooling threshold and is due to begin production late this year, with two follow-on fabs planned.

Counterpoint says that it expects eSSDs to pass half of all NAND bits by year-end, meaning the consumer pool YMTC dominates is shrinking as a share of the total market even as YMTC's slice of it grows. According to the firm, YMTC plans to shift its mix toward eSSDs in the second half, backed by what it called growing avenues for capital support. That shift depends on winning server customers it currently can't reach outside China, and holding a number-three spot earned on cheap bits will get harder if it can't.

As the global AI-induced memory shortage continues to bite and PC makers scramble to get their hands on supply while keeping costs down, a new report claims that PC makers HP, Asus, and Acer have started to use a small amount of Chinese memory chips made by CXMT. According to Nikkei Asia, the limited utilization extends to notebooks for non-U.S. markets.

According to the report, "many" major PC makers have completed the qualification process for CXMT DRAM recently, and "have started to use a limited amount in their notebook computers," citing sources familiar with the matter. The report further states that the vendors are using a "very limited" number of CXMT chips in an equally small number of notebook models. Furthermore, these notebook models are purportedly not destined for sale in the U.S. market.

The restraint is natural, given CXMT is listed by the Pentagon as having ties to China's military; however, the report cites sources who also claim that PC makers are being cautious not to upset the big three memory makers in Micron, Samsung Electronics, and SK hynix. Lawmakers in Washington are reportedly lobbying to have CXMT outright blacklisted.

The report describes the development, which has not been officially confirmed, as a major win for the Chinese company. Acer was the only company to respond to a request for comment by the publication, stating that while the company did not disclose its suppliers, "we keep in close contact with multiple global manufacturers and suppliers to adjust operations to manage component price changes dynamically. We work with multiple manufacturers and suppliers to enhance our supply chain resilience." Notably, Acer did not deny the report.

CXMT recently posted a 466% leap in its share price following its IPO in Shanghai. The company indicated that the majority of its investment is focused on water lines and process upgrades for DRAM, rather than lucrative HBM needed for AI data centers. With memory supply constrained, Apple has reportedly been lobbying the U.S. government for permission to buy CXMT chips. Nikkei's latest report further hints at demand for a fourth player in the memory market to ease supply issues.

Motherboard vendors like Gigabyte have also announced support for CXMT, as companies look to ease pressure on the DIY PC-building market, which has suffered drastic price increases in the last 12 months. The current RAM pricing state of play indicates prices have risen by 400% or more in the last 12 months, making building a PC in 2026 prohibitively expensive for many gamers.

Ironically, Nikkei reports a source who claims that CXMT's memory pricing is not actually any cheaper than the aforementioned three major players, stating, "Their DRAM is definitely no cheaper than the likes of Samsung." As such, it's possible that reports of the likes of HP turning to CXMT may purely be a matter of securing additional supply, rather than saving money.

Apple will pay even more for memory in the September quarter than it did in the June quarter, CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company's earnings call on July 30, after memory costs accounted for more than the entire sequential decline in Apple's adjusted gross margin. Cook, speaking from Cupertino on his final call before John Ternus takes over as CEO, called the market "a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing." Apple's consolidated financial statements for the quarter ended June 27 put inventories at $11.09 billion, up 87% year over year, with $5.46 billion of cash consumed building that position over nine months. CFO Kevan Parekh said the benefit Apple gets from that carry-in inventory shrinks after September.

Apple held $5.93 billion of inventory at the end of June 2025 and $5.72 billion at its September fiscal year end, so the $11.09 billion reported for June 27 is a 94% increase in nine months. The cash flow statement puts the same movement at $5.46 billion consumed by inventories over those nine months, against a $1.22 billion release in the year-ago period. Measured against quarterly cost of sales of $54.65 billion, the June position works out to roughly 18.5 days of inventory, up from about 10.7 days a year earlier. Apple has run one of the leanest working capital positions in consumer electronics for two decades, but that has now been flipped on its head.

Parekh told analysts the carry-in inventory partially offset memory costs in the June quarter and will do so again in September, with a decreasing benefit beyond that. Cook said market pricing for memory keeps rising past September and that the effect on Apple's business could grow. Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley asked whether Apple intends to pursue multi-year long-term agreements with suppliers at pre-agreed prices. Cook answered the second half of the question, on pricing philosophy, and left the agreements question alone.

Company gross margin was 49.3% in the March quarter and 48.1% in June, once the roughly two percentage points of tariff refunds come out, Parekh said, and more than 100% of that 120 basis point decline is explained by memory costs. Apple guided September gross margin to 47% to 48%, including about one percentage point of tariff refunds, putting the adjusted midpoint near 46.5%, and Parekh attributed that step down to the same dynamic. Foreign exchange was a factor in the June quarter but not the main one.

The cost of sales for products rose 8.1% year over year to $47.15 billion, while product revenue increased 18.1% to $78.68 billion, which lifted product gross margin to 40.1% from 34.5%. The Mac and iPad price increases that came in June, the tariff refunds, and the stockpile together more than covered the memory increase in the reported quarter. On the other side of the trade, SK hynix ran a 76% operating margin over the same three months on revenue of 79.32 trillion won and operating profit of 60.54 trillion won, the company said recently, and guided third-quarter DRAM bit shipments up only about 10% sequentially. TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise a further 13% to 18% in the third quarter.

Cook, asked whether Apple's push for sourcing flexibility is about securing volume or protecting its price points, said the DRAM market has three suppliers and that more of them would help on the supply side and perhaps on pricing, then corrected himself to say the pricing effect is unclear. He said Apple is "evaluating all options." The fourth supplier available to him is CXMT, which the Financial Times reported in July that Apple has begun testing DRAM for devices sold in China while lobbying Washington for clearance to use its parts more broadly. Representatives John Moolenaar and George Whitesides wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick earlier this month, asking for purchases from CXMT and YMTC to be barred outright, including through allied supply chains. CXMT listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in July.

The unit supply constraints Apple flagged for the September quarter are a separate problem from memory pricing. Cook attributed them to the availability of the advanced process nodes Apple's SoCs are built on, after iPhone and Mac demand ran ahead of the company's plan, and said they'll hit iPhone, Mac, and iPad in September, against Mac primarily in the June quarter. Apple guided September revenue growth of 9% to 11% year over year, down from 16% in the previous quarter.

Memory supply from major DRAM manufacturers to independent module makers could drop to just 30% of the amount supplied in 2026 next year, according to C.K. Chang, CEO of Taiwanese memory vendor Apacer, further tightening an already squeezed supply chain.

Chang made the comments during the company's 1H 2026 investor conference on July 24, and in subsequent media interviews after the conference. Although memory price increases are expected to slow during the second half of 2026 — reportedly due to consumers deciding that RAM is too expensive — he believes severe shortages will persist into at least the middle of 2027, and that DRAM will remain the most constrained segment.

According to Chang, the greatest risk facing Apacer, which buys memory wafers from manufacturers such as SK Hynix and Samsung and turns them into finished memory products, is no longer overpaying for the chips, but failing to obtain any supply at all.

In preparation for growing shortages and to prevent a wider shortfall next year, the company says it grew its inventory to NT$12.4 billion ($383.2 million USD) at the end of June, up from NT$8.38 billion ($259 million USD) one quarter earlier, representing an increase of approximately 48%. The company is also arranging a five-year syndicated loan of up to NT$4 billion ($123.6 million USD) to purchase additional chips whenever manufacturers make them available, among other needs.

Chang’s projection does not mean worldwide DRAM production will fall by more than 70%. His statement specifically refers to the volume major chip manufacturers may allocate to downstream module companies such as Apacer, which purchases memory chips and packages them into DIMMs, SSDs and embedded storage products. DRAM manufacturers are increasingly reserving their output for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), server memory, and other products purchased directly by large AI and cloud customers.

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — the world's biggest memory chip makers — are prioritizing higher-margin HBM and advanced server memory as AI infrastructure spending consumes an increasing share of available manufacturing capacity. Chang estimates that approximately 60% of DRAM capacity is now directed toward server-related applications, leaving conventional DDR4 and DDR5 products competing for a shrinking portion of the market.

DDR5 RDIMM server modules have received some of the most aggressive price increases and retain the greatest potential for future mark-ups, according to Chang. Demand from AI servers, enterprise storage, industrial computers and edge AI systems remains strong, while consumer PC and smartphone demand is considerably weaker and more sensitive to rising component costs. That weaker demand is, of course, mostly in comparison to the AI industry. Consumer demand remains strong enough to mop up the shrinking supply. The RAM shortage is now reportedly affecting the price of cars, far beyond consumer electronics.

NAND flash is also being pulled into the AI boom. High-capacity enterprise SSDs are increasingly being used for model storage, data staging and key-value cache offloading, allowing colder portions of AI workloads to spill out of expensive DRAM. Flash cannot replace DRAM outright because it offers considerably lower bandwidth, but it can still serve as a tier within AI memory systems, increasing demand for enterprise SSDs and NAND alongside server memory.

Chang expects DRAM contract prices to rise by approximately 30% during the third quarter of 2026 and NAND flash to increase by more than 20%. He expects price growth to moderate again during the fourth quarter.

Elsewhere, analysts project a 40% increase in DRAM prices in Q3 2026, even as demand extends to the oldest standards still in production. Samsung and SK Hynix, both South Korean companies — who together with US-based Micron Technologies control over 90% of the global DRAM market — had earlier warned that shortages could last beyond 2027. And the CEO of Adata projects that the global DRAM shortage will run for another 10 years.

Chinese manufacturers are not expected to provide immediate relief. Chang said Chinese memory maker CXMT’s DDR5 products had become competitive and that both CXMT and Chinese NAND producer YMTC had narrowed their pricing gaps with established international suppliers. However, domestic demand in China already exceeds available supply, while capacity expansion, manufacturing yields, product validation and platform compatibility continue to limit their ability to change the global balance. Furthermore, the prices of new DRAM modules from CXMT are reportedly similar to those of the big three.

Stockpiling memory inventory at historically high prices carries the risk of substantial losses if the market suddenly reverses. Apacer, however, says it has seen no evidence of an approaching collapse. For now, the company is betting that possessing expensive memory in 2027 will be considerably better than having no memory to sell at all.

Adata chairman Simon Chen (Chen Li-bai) said the global DRAM shortage will run for another 10 years and that talk of an AI bubble is premature, according to a Commercial Times report. Chen made the comments after Taiwanese stocks slumped in the wake of TSMC's record second-quarter results, a selloff that revived concerns about overheated AI investment. The same report carries Adata's forecast that DRAM contract prices will climb another 20% to 30% in the third quarter, with NAND flash rising 35% to 40%.

Electricity, particularly green power, and memory will be the world's two scarcest resources over the next decade, Chen told Commercial Times. He rejected the argument that Meta and other cloud providers renting out spare compute capacity prove investment has overshot demand. Chen countered that AI applications will spread across business, government, and consumer markets, and that analysts who judge the cycle from short-term capital spending or a single company's utilization rate underestimate long-term demand.

Beyond data centers, he pointed to robots, driverless vehicles, unmanned factories and stores, smart homes, and low-Earth-orbit satellites, a pool of edge devices he said could reach tens of billions of units. He also said that the industry can revisit the bubble question after 2030, to "discuss whether the AI bubble will happen in 2040 or 2050," per the report.

Meanwhile, memory makers aren't standing still on capacity. SK hynix raised a record $26.5 billion in its U.S. IPO this month to fund HBM manufacturing expansion, Nanya plans to quadruple capital spending to $6.2 billion in 2027, and China's CXMT is reportedly approaching Micron-scale DRAM output this year.

Chen argues that none of it loosens the market, and that the big three suppliers learned from past downturns and will expand cautiously rather than repeat the disorderly capacity races that cratered prices in earlier cycles. At the same time, Chinese makers remain constrained by restricted access to semiconductor equipment and multi-year fab construction timelines. On that basis, he said current talk of supply and demand easing has no solid foundation, and he expects prices and module-maker profits to keep rising through the second half.

Chen's forecasts align with his company's balance sheet. Adata had stockpiled more than NT$30 billion in chip inventory by late February and was among the Taiwanese module makers that raised roughly $880 million in debt and share placements to keep buying chips, so every quarter of rising contract prices lifts the value of what it already holds. Back in October, he said the simultaneous shortage of DRAM, NAND, SSDs, and hard drives was the first he'd seen in 30 years in the industry, and DRAM contract prices have since risen as much as 171% year over year.

The head of the SK Group, which owns SK hynix, said in a press briefing that memory semiconductor prices are “abnormally high,” and that the industry must take steps to increase supply and help lower prices. The Chosun Daily writes that SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won delivered this statement during a press briefing at an industry forum, where he also noted that the group is looking at building a memory chip plant in the U.S. to increase production.

“Memory prices are currently at an abnormally high level. While AI companies can absorb increased costs through investments, PC and smartphone manufacturers have no choice but to pass rising semiconductor costs onto product prices,” Chey told the media. “Since most customers for these products are individuals, there are limits to how much prices can be raised. To prevent 'chipflation'—where rising chip prices drive up finished product costs—supply must be expanded.”

Aside from expanding supply and easing memory prices for consumer products, extremely high memory prices brought about by limited supply could negatively impact the big three companies. That’s because the high margins could lead to the entry of new players or give smaller manufacturers the opportunity to grow their presence and challenge the established firms. We’re already seeing this, as some Chinese brands have ditched them for domestically produced CXMT and YMTC chips. While this could be driven by Beijing, even major multinational brands like Corsair and Lenovo have started sourcing from these companies just to get chips. Even Apple is asking permission from Washington to buy memory chips from CXMT. Aside from that, he also cited Elon Musk’s interest in building his own fab as a potential threat to existing memory semiconductor companies.

This isn’t a problem at the moment as there is more than enough demand to go around for incumbent memory and storage chip manufacturers and new entrants. In fact, memory companies can use this as a defense against price-fixing lawsuits, with the massive AI demand and the higher margins it offers standing as a plausible reason why memory chip companies focused on HBM production and reduced DRAM output. But before the AI boom, the memory industry was actually suffering from one of the worst memory downturns to hit the industry for over a decade. So, if and when the memory shortage is over and the memory industry resumes its boom-and-bust cycle, more manufacturers jockeying to find customers in a tight market would make it that much harder for these companies to survive and thrive.

Micron committed up to $3 billion to the U.S. semiconductor supply chain last week. Of that, $500 million goes to GlobalWafers as strategic financing — subject to definitive agreements and closing conditions — for its 300mm raw silicon wafer plant in Sherman, Texas, and the two companies will sign a 10-year agreement for access to that plant's output. Ben Tessone, Micron's senior vice president and chief procurement officer, tied the move to securing "critical input materials." In a second announcement from Boise the same day, Micron raised its planned US spending to more than $250 billion through 2035, up from $200 billion, and poured the first load of concrete at its Clay, New York megafab a quarter ahead of schedule.

Running until 2035, the $250 billion spending target is attached to a goal of making 40% of Micron's DRAM in the U.S. by the mid-2030s. Only a relatively paltry $500 million of that $250 billion has been earmarked for buying wafer supply from GlobalFoundries, the only U.S. supplier that’s capable of producing 300mm wafers.

The 300mm wafer market

Roughly 85% of global 300mm wafer capacity sits with five suppliers, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence: Shin-Etsu and SUMCO of Japan, Taiwan's GlobalWafers, Germany's Siltronic, and South Korea's SK Siltron. The two Japanese firms hold more than half between them.

GlobalWafers America opened the Sherman plant in May last year on an initial $3.5 billion investment. It’s the first fully integrated 300mm raw wafer facility built in the U.S. in more than two decades, and the company says it’s the only CHIPS-participating supplier capable of producing advanced 300mm wafers domestically. The site holds a CHIPS Act award of up to $406 million, finalized in December 2024 and shared with a silicon-on-insulator plant in St. Peters, Missouri. Commerce Department figures from 2022 put full-build capacity at around 1.2 million wafers per month across a six-phase campus, with one phase currently running.

Meanwhile, SUMCO is ending 200mm production at its Miyazaki site and has slowed new 300mm expansion. The leading-edge capacity Shin-Etsu and SUMCO added in 2025 was sized to match contracted demand rather than to build ahead of the market. Wafer suppliers have run this way for a decade, protecting margins instead of chasing volume, and with suppliers holding back, the capital for new capacity increasingly comes from their customers.

GlobalWafers chairperson and CEO Doris Hsu set out her terms for that at the Sherman opening, announcing an additional $4 billion for the site and telling Reuters that further phases depended on the first two turning a profit, on customers signing long-term contracts, and on reasonable pricing, prepayments, and government support. Micron's $500 million in financing and a decade-long supply commitment cover most of that list, and Hsu has since called the Micron agreement the largest long-term deal in her company's history and said a second Sherman phase is now necessary.

Micron is locking in its own customers on the same basis, having signed a strategic customer agreement with General Motors on July 1 and another with Ford on July 6, two of 16 such agreements the company cited on its fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call. Each ties future memory output to a named buyer.

We’ve seen the industry do this before. During the memory boom of 2017-2018, chipmakers signed prepaid, take-or-pay wafer agreements to guarantee supply, but those prepayments became balance-sheet liabilities when DRAM pricing fell through 2019. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told an audience at Nvidia's GTC conference that the current wafer shortage could last through 2030 with a deficit above 20%, which is the argument for signing now. Conversely, the 2019 write-downs are the argument against.

HBM packaging

High-bandwidth memory is of course the component that’s currently carrying the steepest premiums in the AI market, and a fabbed wafer isn’t yet HBM. The die has to be stacked and packaged using advanced 2.5D methods with through-silicon vias, the capacity for which is located almost entirely in Asia. Micron's committed HBM packaging anchor is a roughly $7 billion facility in Singapore, with operations starting in 2026. Per a June 2025 SEC filing, the company lists U.S. HBM packaging as an intention, but no committed site or date has yet been announced.

As for U.S. packaging capacity that is scheduled, it’s all clustered in or around 2028. SK hynix is building the first U.S. 2.5D advanced packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana, a roughly $3.87 billion project with mass production set for the second half of 2028. Amkor, meanwhile, has expanded its Peoria, Arizona campus to $7 billion, with production slated for early 2028. TSMC's Arizona fabs run leading-edge logic but don’t yet offer high-volume 2.5D packaging on U.S. soil — this is reportedly planned for 2029. While it’s true that a wafer fabbed in New York and packaged in Singapore counts toward domestic DRAM, it doesn’t make the finished HBM stack domestic.

Output timelines vs. 2035

Micron's Manassas, Virginia fab began producing 1-alpha DRAM in May, and it’s the only U.S.-made memory in volume, representing roughly 2% of the world’s supply. The first new Idaho fab should reach wafer output in mid-2027, and the second in late 2028, while the Clay, New York campus isn’t expected to produce until around 2030. The $250 billion capex figure runs five years past that, while conventional DRAM contract prices continue to rise at record amounts — more than 90% quarter over quarter in early 2026, according to TrendForce — and manufacturers increase prices. Apple raised MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pro prices last month, citing memory costs, and none of the announced U.S. capacity will do anything to alleviate such shortages.

Samsung and SK hynix committed a combined $880 billion under a South Korean government-coordinated chip and AI program announced last month, spread over roughly a decade. That spending is domestic to Korea and separate from Samsung's $37 billion Texas footprint. But set next to Micron's $250 billion, we’re seeing a pattern of more companies announcing more capex than construction projects can physically absorb.

HBM consumes roughly three times the wafer area per bit of standard DDR5, so shifting production to HBM removes more commodity memory from the market. DRAM already takes around a fifth of global 300mm capacity, and memory is the largest single application for 300mm silicon. Micron's Sumit Sadana told CNBC in January the company could meet “at most” two-thirds of some customers' medium-term demand.

SK hynix has completed the largest-ever foreign company IPO in U.S. history, raising $26.5 billion in its Nasdaq debut today, July 10. The South Korean memory giant sold 177.9 million American depositary receipts (ADRs) — a U.S.-listed stand-in for a foreign share — at $149 apiece, each representing a tenth of a Seoul-listed share. The offering was more than seven times oversubscribed and drew demand from more than 500 investment firms, according to Financial Times. Temporary Nasdaq trading is underway under the ticker SKHYV before regular-way trading begins as SKHY on Monday, July 13.

The offering was led by Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, with nine additional firms rounding out a 13-bank syndicate. Anchor demand came from heavyweight institutions including Baillie Gifford, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners, which together signaled interest in as much as $7 billion of stock, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Financial Times.

SK hynix is the world's leading maker of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the vertically stacked DRAM that has become critical infrastructure for AI accelerators. The company has said it will steer the proceeds toward boosting its AI-memory manufacturing capacity. Confirmed build-outs include the first-phase fab at the massive Yongin semiconductor cluster, a new P&T7 advanced-packaging line in Cheongju, and EUV lithography equipment slated for delivery by the end of next year. Separately, SK hynix is constructing its first U.S. production site, a $4 billion advanced-packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana, targeted for completion around 2028. The facility is eligible for up to $458 million in CHIPS Act grants and up to $570 million in federal loans.

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SK hynix is seeing sensational growth thanks to the ongoing AI boom. The company is reportedly on track to post over 200 trillion won ($133 billion) in operating profit this year, a record-breaking figure that would see SK hynix employees earn around $400,000 each in bonuses. The company’s Seoul-listed stock is up roughly 220% year-to-date and has climbed more than sixfold over the past year.

In late June, SK hynix briefly surpassed Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company, closing at around 2,080 trillion won (about $1.35 trillion), a meteoric rise for a company that almost declared bankruptcy in 2001 and, more recently, recorded an annual operating loss of 7.73 trillion won in 2023. That rise doesn't seem like it will be slowing down any time soon. SK hynix has said its entire 2026 output of HBM, DRAM, and NAND is already sold out, with the crunch expected to extend into 2027.

Nanya Technology plans to increase its capital expenditure to more than TW$200 billion ($6.2 billion) in 2027, roughly four times its budget for this year, President Pei-Ing Lee said during an online briefing. The Taiwanese memory maker reported unaudited second-quarter revenue of T$82.55 billion, up 684% from 2025, and net income of T$50.19 billion, up 1,324%. Gross margin reached 79.5%, against a negative 20.6% during the same quarter of 2025. That single quarter's profit is 7.6 times what Nanya earned across the entirety of last year, and the quarter's revenue exceeds the company's entire 2025 sales.

Nanya spent T$13.2 billion on capex in 2023, T$16.1 billion in 2024, and T$13.4 billion in 2025, and has budgeted up to T$52 billion for 2026, per its Q1 investor presentation. Those four years together come to T$94.7 billion, less than half what Lee intends to spend in 2027 alone. Lee, however, admits that the 2027 figure is preliminary and hasn’t yet gone to the board, and that the new plant will absorb about T$480 billion at full capacity.

Nanya's average selling price climbed more than 70% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026, while its bit shipments fell by a mid-single-digit percentage, its own results deck shows. The company is targeting bit shipment growth in the teens for the full year, so almost all of the 684% revenue increase is due to price. Meanwhile, TrendForce projects a further 13% to 18% rise in conventional DRAM contract prices in Q3.

Roughly 70% of Nanya's shipments are DDR4 and low-power DDR4, Lee said at a January earnings conference, and DDR5 contributes about 10% of revenue. Nanya builds no high-bandwidth memory, and Lee has ruled out competing in HBM2, HBM3, HBM3E, or HBM4. A customized HBM part for edge AI, developed with Etron Technology, Piecemakers Technology, and Formosa Advanced Technologies, is targeted for the end of this year, however. Its 79.5% margin is close to a pure reading on conventional DRAM, and it sits within six points of the 85% consolidated gross margin Micron reported in its most recent 10-Q with HBM in the mix.

SanDisk, Kioxia, Solidigm, and Cisco paid T$78.72 billion for 10.19% of Nanya in a private placement completed in April, with SanDisk and Kioxia signing long-term DRAM supply agreements alongside the equity. Three of the four make SSDs and need DRAM for cache. Solidigm is a subsidiary of SK hynix, the world's second-largest DRAM maker, and it went to a supplier holding roughly 2% of the market to source it.

The first phase of Nanya's new fab in New Taipei City's Taishan District reaches 30,000 wafers per month in 2028 and expands to 45,000 later, Lee said Friday. The plant will run Nanya's 1B node, its second-generation 10nm-class process, to build DDR5, DDR4, and low-power DDR4, the company said during a March briefing. Lee said at that briefing that the most severe supply constraints run through the first half of 2027 and that the shortage persists into 2028. Samsung's P3 fab alone is expected to reach around 115,000 wafers per month by the end of this year.

An Intel patent application published on July 2, 2026, surfaced by Underfox, has revealed the company's plans for a new high-bandwidth memory (HBM) architecture that aims to ease the packaging and cost bottleneck of today's interposer-based HBM. The patent application — filed back on December 26, 2024 — describes what Intel calls cross-batch memory (XBM), an "ultra-high-bandwidth memory with backend transistors" built with the goal of matching HBM4's footprint while swapping conventional DRAM and its ultra-wide interface for back-end-of-line (BEOL) transistors and serial Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) links.

Intel's proposed design is a memory stack that addresses the assembly costs that make conventional HBM expensive by dropping the costly silicon interposer and shrinking the package, while building in its own defect repair.

The filing lays out a stack of memory dies, each holding one-transistor one-capacitor (1T1C) DRAM fabricated in the back-end-of-line, wired together with through-silicon via (TSV) "gutters" and both-sided high-bandwidth interconnect (HBI) connections. Intel describes dies of roughly 1.5 gigabytes (GB) apiece — 768 "datablocks" arranged in a 32-by-24 grid, grouped into eight channels of eight sub-channels each — stacked eight high and scaling to 16. Data then leaves the stack over UCIe I/O bundles running at 32 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), funneled out through a base die.

To understand what Intel is changing, it helps to recall what standard high-bandwidth memory does. HBM stacks DRAM dies vertically on a base logic die, threads them together with TSVs, and communicates with the processor across a silicon interposer using an extremely wide parallel interface — on the order of 1,024 bits per stack. This width is how HBM delivers its bandwidth, but it is also what makes it expensive to package and hard to scale, as every one of those wires has to be routed through an interposer sitting between the memory and the compute die. As AI accelerators have outrun the rate at which memory can feed them, this "memory wall" has become the dominant constraint on performance, which is why nearly every large chipmaker is now attacking the interface and the stack rather than the logic.

XBM's first major change is structural. Conventional DRAM cells are built in the front-end-of-line, the base silicon layer where transistors are normally fabricated. XBM instead moves the 1T1C cell into the back-end-of-line, the metal-and-via stack above the transistor layer, using thin-film transistors. Building memory in the BEOL is what lets Intel pack the die into many small, independently addressable memory blocks, and it is the same backend-transistor direction Intel has pursued for placing memory directly over logic.

The second change is the interface. Rather than HBM's wide parallel PHY, XBM serializes data onto UCIe bundles at 32 GT/s, with the base die handling the serialize/deserialize step and routing all I/O to the compute die. Moving to a standard chiplet interconnect is what makes the design "chiplet-native" and, Intel argues, simpler and cheaper to package than an interposer-bound HBM stack. The tradeoff is that 32 GT/s is UCIe's current top data rate, so the interface is already running at the spec ceiling rather than leaving obvious headroom.

Intel also leans heavily on repairability. The base die carries dedicated spare channels, built-in self-repair (BISR), decode and debug logic, and four sub-channels of redundant memory arrays that act as fungible spares for defects in the dies above — post-assembly repair designed to claw back yield on a very tall stack.

A large portion of the patent application focuses not on the memory cell at all but on how to mount it. Intel details memory-on-package (MoP) and "reversed overhang" structures aimed at cutting the stack's Z-height — conventional MoP can add 300 to 350 micrometers (µm) — while removing the stiffener normally needed to control warpage and feeding DRAM power directly from the voltage regulator. This is the concrete basis for the "smaller, cheaper package" claim.

XBM should not be confused with ZAM (Z-Angle Memory), the architecture Intel is co-developing with SoftBank subsidiary SAIMEMORY and set to present at the VLSI Symposium 2026. ZAM's innovation is on the bonding side — a fusion-bonded, nine-layer stack of largely conventional DRAM with roughly 3-µm-thin silicon between tiers — and it reportedly targets around twice HBM4's bandwidth density, with commercialization aimed at 2029. XBM, by contrast, is an Intel-only filing that changes the DRAM transistor itself and the interface. Read together, they suggest Intel is running at least two parallel HBM alternatives, a fitting move for a company that began in 1968 as a memory maker.

The caveats on Intel’s proposed HBM architecture are the usual ones for a patent. The patent was filed 18 months ago, and there’s currently no product or roadmap, signaling potential intent rather than a shipping part. The UCIe interface is already at its rate ceiling, backend-transistor DRAM remains unproven at manufacturing scale, and the whole thing still has to justify itself against HBM4E and Intel's own ZAM timeline.

While PC enthusiasts and DIYers gnash their teeth over the RAMpocalypse, the world’s makers and DIYers are busying themselves with alternative, DIY, and left-field solutions to the terrible component crunch. The latest to throw their hat in the DIY memory ring is polymatt with a video walkthrough showing how they made a USB drive with 64 bits of storage. Yes, bits, not even bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and certainly not terabytes. Still, the video provides another look at the charms of ancient (in computing terms) Magnetic Core Memory.

Polymatt sums up their finished USB memory device as a gizmo with “64 iron rings, hand threaded and immersed in silicon oil.” Each ring can store a single bit, providing 64 bits (8 bytes) of total storage capacity. Though this way of providing memory to computer systems seems incredibly archaic, it was good enough for the Apollo spacecraft guidance computers.

Polymatt got a key ingredient for this retro-modern memory stick project by salvaging an old Russian computer for its tiny magnetic rings. Then we see the TechTuber skillfully make each component of the finished magnetic core memory device by hand, by soldering iron, by CNC machine, and using a Bambu Lab A2L 3D printer.

While Polymatt humbly describes the device they made as the “world’s worst USB drive,” that’s only probably true if judged by its capacity-to-weight ratio. In aesthetic terms, it looks great on the desk. Moreover, what it might lack in memory density it makes up for (a bit) by offering persistent (unpowered) storage, and it can even shrug off radiation bursts that would fry most modern memory devices.

Check out the 20-minute video if you want to see every step in the maker process. In comparison to the far larger 128-byte magnetic core memory USB drive made by a Japanese tech enthusiast earlier in the year, Polymatt’s model is rather better finished. As the TechTuber admits, the silicone oil probably wasn’t necessary, but they basically liked the aesthetic. Fair enough. They were also pondering over installing an LED for each bit, but shelved that idea.

The last section of Polymatt’s video is devoted to testing the DIY memory device. Unlike the USB storage you may be familiar with, this drive doesn’t store your discrete computer data files. Rather, it lets you edit a single persistent file dubbed core.txt, stored on the magnetic core memory array. Polymatt also verified the non-powered persistence of this DIY memory device. Unplugging and plugging the power to this USB-connected device proved that it is indeed a non-volatile memory device.

In related homebrew memory news, we are still waiting for Dr. Semiconductor to follow up on his making RAM in a garden shed cleanroom video with the promised ‘PC scale’ sequel.

Memory prices will keep climbing through the third quarter of 2026, but the blistering increases of the past few quarters are set to cool as consumer buyers reach the ceiling of what they can afford, according to a detailed TrendForce report. The research firm's latest memory pricing survey projects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 13% to 18% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) in Q3 2026, with NAND Flash contract prices increasing 10% to 15%; substantial gains, but a marked slowdown from the roughly 60% jumps recorded in the second quarter.

According to the report, the cooldown is driven by consumer electronics manufacturers' unwillingness and inability to absorb higher memory costs after months of relentless price increases, rather than by improved supply. In other words, memory remains in short supply, but consumers are no longer willing to keep paying ever-higher prices.

AI continues to be the market's driving force. Demand for AI inference systems and hyperscale data centers remains strong enough to keep both DRAM and NAND supply constrained, while memory manufacturers continue shifting production capacity toward higher-margin server products. This leaves less capacity available for consumer memory, preventing prices from falling even as demand from PCs and smartphones weakens.

As a result, the memory market is increasingly split between enterprise and consumer customers. On the server side, TrendForce expects demand to remain healthy through 2027 as improving CPU availability supports continued deployments of AI servers built around x86 processors and registered DIMMs (RDIMMs). Although server DRAM is expected to remain undersupplied during the third quarter, price increases should moderate because a portion of purchases is covered by long-term supply agreements.

Consumer markets appear to paint a very different picture. Notebook manufacturers are expected to keep replenishing inventories, but higher memory costs are gradually feeding through into retail pricing, a trend TrendForce believes could weigh on PC shipments for the rest of the year. Smartphone vendors face similar pressure, with many expected to raise handset prices to offset persistently high LPDRAM (low-power DRAM) costs while simultaneously becoming more cautious with production plans as consumer demand softens.

The same pattern is beginning to emerge across storage products. PC manufacturers accumulated substantial client SSD inventories during the first half of 2026, reducing their willingness to accept another round of price increases. Suppliers have responded by taking a more flexible approach during contract negotiations, helping to moderate SSD pricing even as enterprise storage continues to benefit from AI infrastructure spending.

Not every segment is seeing the same level of demand. TrendForce notes that NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell has yet to generate the expected wave of GDDR7 demand, while weaker notebook shipments have also softened demand for graphics memory. At the opposite end of the market, retail products such as USB flash drives and memory cards remain sluggish as higher upstream costs become increasingly difficult to pass on to consumers.

For PC builders, the report suggests that meaningful price relief is still some way off. Memory prices are continuing to rise because AI infrastructure remains the industry's top priority. However, the pace of those increases is slowing as consumer demand reaches its breaking point.

The SEMI industry association, which includes top memory chip manufacturers Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix, has written a letter to the Trump administration urging against any type of intervention in the memory market that would influence prices or production capacity, saying that it will worsen the shortage. According to Bloomberg, the group sent the letter after a lawmaker sent a letter (PDF) asking the Commerce Department to address the issue as the situation is projected to impact the auto industry.

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) wrote to Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick in April, asking the government to take steps “to ensure that the U.S. auto industry is fully supplied with memory chips.” However, the industry group is against this. “While targeted policies can support accelerating domestic supply resilience, interventions that distort pricing or capacity decisions risk prolonging the demand downturn,” SEMI said in its message to the government. “Current market conditions are being addressed through investments in American manufacturing and an increasing focus on long-term purchase agreements.”

Apple is attempting to address this shortage by lobbying the government to let it purchase memory chips from blacklisted Chinese firm CXMT. SEMI takes a different approach for a temporary solution to the crisis. Instead of allowing a new player to enter the U.S. market, it suggested that the administration should work with Congress to pass tax deductions or credits on consumer electronics, thus offsetting the rising prices caused by the chip shortage.

The group claims that even though memory manufacturing capacity is expected to increase by around 19% annually. But even though memory makers are building fabs to help expand output, it will take years for these facilities to come online. This means that demand for memory chips, primarily driven by demand from AI hyperscalers, is expected to outstrip supply, with Samsung and SK hynix saying that the shortages could last until 2027 or even longer.

Consumers are looking for alternatives to expensive memory if they need to buy a new computer, which could be seen with increased demand for slower, more affordable DDR4. This has grown so much that companies are restarting production of DDR4 motherboards and memory kits. These are still relatively expensive, though, so the vast majority are simply delaying their planned upgrade, as seen in the 7% drop on PC purchases in the first quarter of 2026, with experts estimating a total of 14% decline in annual deliveries — the biggest market contraction in the last three years.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Monday, June 29, announced an 800 trillion won ($520 billion) public-private investment plan alongside Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to expand the country's chipmaking capacity, a move the government framed as essential to keeping South Korea competitive in the global artificial intelligence race. Lee unveiled the plan in a televised state address at his office in Seoul, flanked by Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, the leaders of the world's two largest memory chipmakers.

"Right now is truly a decisive moment, as the landscape of the global economy is being reshaped," Lee said in televised remarks. "Major countries, including the U.S. and China, are engaged in all-out competition with massive stakes." He added that only through cooperation between the private and public sectors could South Korea hope to triumph. Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan said the plan would let the country rapidly expand production by sharply shortening the timeline from licensing to construction.

The centerpiece of the partnership is the construction of four production facilities, with Samsung and SK Hynix each building two. According to the government, the new plants will be built in the southwestern part of the country, near the city of Gwangju, a mostly rural area far from the existing semiconductor base south of Seoul, where both companies operate major clusters. Samsung will also build packaging facilities for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips in Chungcheong as demand for the advanced components soars.

"HBM, which is indispensable for the training and inference of AI models, requires cutting-edge technology for stacking semiconductor chips," the Samsung chairman said. "We will focus our investment on HBM fabs, which require main-fab-level processes, alongside existing semiconductor back-end fabs in the Chungcheong region, including Cheonan and Onyang."

One detail the government did not provide was the split between public and private money, as the project is a combined public-private commitment rather than a government spending program. While it is not immediately clear how much of the 800 trillion won would come from the state versus the two chipmakers, the disclosed line items are comparatively modest.

Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan said the government and industry would jointly invest more than 30 trillion won over 15 years across the semiconductor value chain, while President Lee said Gwangju and South Jeolla province would contribute a further 5 trillion to 20 trillion won. Kim put another 81 trillion won toward the Chungcheong packaging hub, though he did not say how much of that is public.

The balance of the headline number is widely expected to be company capital expenditure, with the state's role concentrated in subsidies, faster permitting, and infrastructure. Kim said the government would streamline approvals and bring fab construction forward by up to 12 years, from the mid-2040s to the mid-2030s.

The plan also absorbs and accelerates projects already underway. The government said it would help Samsung and SK Hynix speed up construction of their existing capital-region clusters, with SK Group pulling forward the ramp of its Yongin memory site from 2045 to 2033, part of a stated goal to double the country's memory output within five years. SK Hynix supplies the bulk of the HBM that Nvidia depends on for its AI accelerators, the very strain this expansion is meant to relieve. While semiconductors are the focus of the investment, with the priority being a decisive lead in memory chips, the companies will also work on AI robots, physical AI, and AI data centers.

The investment partnership appears to be the latest piece of a broader strategy. SK Hynix had already committed $15 billion to new semiconductor facilities in February, a figure that now reads as an early piece of the larger national framework. Earlier iterations of the country's cluster plan had pegged long-term investment at around $471 billion, stretching to 2047, so the new figure represents a substantial expansion as AI demand projections have climbed. The fabs are targeted for completion in the mid-2030s.

The announcement caps an extraordinary stretch for both firms. SK Hynix overtook Samsung in June to become South Korea's most valuable listed company for the first time in more than 25 years, lifted by its commanding lead in HBM, while Samsung's chip division alone booked 53.7 trillion won in first-quarter operating profit as AI-driven memory shortages are expected to strain the companies' capacity past 2027.

The scale of the investments also invites inevitable comparison. At roughly $520 billion, South Korea’s plan dwarfs the United States' CHIPS Act, which provided about $52 billion in direct subsidies, by a factor of ten. Although the comparison is imperfect, since the U.S. figure is a government subsidy while the Korean number appears to be mostly private investment that the state is coordinating.

The strategic logic is the same on both sides of the Pacific: secure domestic capacity for the chips that underpin AI, at a moment when the U.S., China, Japan and the EU are all pursuing their own semiconductor industrial strategies. For Seoul, the specific prize is memory, the segment where its two companies already hold a commanding global position, with the goal being to extend that lead rather than merely defend it.

TSMC has reportedly told customers to prepare for price increases across its advanced chipmaking portfolio, extending the hikes beyond the newer 3nm process to include 7nm and even legacy products. According to a June 23rd Culpium report, the increases would affect the bulk of TSMC’s wafer revenue and could raise costs for major chip designers, including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek.

The exact size of the increases remains unclear, as figures would reportedly vary by customer, node, and product category, but generally appear to fall in the 5% to 10% range. TSMC price increases have reportedly already started rolling out in some cases, while other customers have been told to build the higher cost structure into future purchase orders.

The company declined to discuss specific pricing with Culpium. “TSMC does not comment on pricing. Our pricing strategy is strategic, not opportunistic,” the company said in a statement to the publication. “We will continue to work closely with customers and sell our value to them.” Although the company had earlier said it would refrain from raising prices.

Earlier reports from Taiwanese media had mainly pointed to increases at TSMC’s 3nm node, one of its most advanced processes currently used for premium smartphones, PC, and AI chips, with price pressure also expected at the newest 2nm-class production. However, Culpium reports that TSMC has informed clients that “all advanced nodes” will become more expensive, meaning the hikes would extend beyond 3nm and 2nm to include older but still advanced processes such as 5nm and 7nm.

3nm alone accounted for 25% of TSMC’s wafer revenue in the first quarter of 2026, while the company’s full advanced-node portfolio — defined by TSMC as 7nm and more advanced technologies — accounted for 74% of wafer revenue. Therefore, the hikes would span nearly three-quarters of the company’s wafer business.

The inclusion of 7nm is especially notable because the node is no longer TSMC’s flagship technology. However, it's not exactly surprising as 7nm remains heavily used across processors, accelerators, networking silicon, and other high-performance chips. Many products remain on older, more advanced nodes because they offer better cost, yield, and maturity than the newest processes, especially when a design does not require the density or efficiency gains of 3nm or 2nm.

The client notices follow weeks of public comments from TSMC executives suggesting that higher prices were at least under consideration. At the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Hsinchu on June 4, CEO C.C. Wei said customers remained positive on the AI demand outlook, while also acknowledging cost pressures and the widening gap between chip demand and available manufacturing capacity. CFO Wendell Huang also said earlier that TSMC did not rule out price increases as inflation, overseas expansion, and advanced manufacturing costs continue to rise.

The timing of the price increases reflects TSMC’s strong negotiating position. The company remains the dominant manufacturer of leading-edge logic chips, and its most advanced capacity is in high demand among AI accelerator vendors, smartphone chip designers, and custom ASIC developers. With customers competing for access to the same manufacturing lines, TSMC has more room to pass on rising costs than it would in a weaker cycle.

The move also comes as TSMC benefits from a surge in AI-related demand. In its first-quarter results, the company reported $35.9 billion in revenue and a 66.2% gross margin, both supported by strong demand for high-performance computing and advanced-node production. TSMC has also raised its 2026 revenue growth target to more than 30%, with capital spending expected to remain elevated as the company expands capacity in Taiwan, the U.S., Japan, and Germany. The company’s Arizona manufacturing capacity has been sold out through 2027 since early 2025.

The reported increases are still far smaller than the recent price spikes seen in the memory market, where AI-driven demand for HBM and other high-end memory products has allowed suppliers to push through much steeper increases. Conversely, TSMC does not need memory-style pricing to meaningfully improve its margins. Because advanced nodes account for most of its wafer revenue, even a mid-single-digit increase across that base could add billions of dollars in annual revenue if demand remains strong.

For chip designers, the immediate impact is a higher manufacturing bill. For consumers, the effect is less direct but still important. A 5% to 10% wafer price increase does not automatically translate into a 5% to 10% increase in the price of a GPU, CPU, smartphone, or laptop, since the wafer is only one part of the final product cost. However, when combined with higher memory prices, packaging constraints, AI demand, and rising manufacturing costs, it creates another reason for device makers and component vendors to raise prices or protect margins by cutting costs elsewhere.

The Steam Machine was finally released on Monday, and many gamers were disappointed with its $1,049 starting price, which doesn’t include a Steam Controller (you have to pay an extra $79 to bundle one). Unfortunately, Valve’s hands were tied in this due to the current RAMpocalypse, where even the cheapest RAM kits now cost four times as much as before. While engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat said that they cannot give a hard number for the console’s original price point, they told IGN in an interview that it would have experienced a “probably similar” price increase to the one the Steam Deck got in May 2026.

Given that the Steam Deck 512GB and 1TB experienced a price increase of around 45%, it stands to reason that the Steam Machine would have received the same hike if it were already in the market. So, if we extrapolate the numbers, the Steam Machine would’ve been originally priced at around $729.91. The 1TB Steam Deck’s price jumped by 46.22%, but we can’t just apply that increase to the higher-tier Steam Machine because it has double the storage capacity. But if we check our SSD price tracker, the price difference between the cheapest 1TB and 2TB SSDs was just at $28 when they were at their lowest. If we add this to the 1TB "version" of the living room PC console, then we can safely estimate that Valve’s target price for the 2TB Steam Machine is around $950-$1,000.

The Steam Machine is still more expensive than the PlayStation 5 Pro, even at its original prices, because Valve refuses to subsidize its hardware sales with the sales on the Steam store. After all, the Steam Machine has an open hardware philosophy, allowing buyers to do what they want with the console. You can install Windows 11 on it and just stick with PC Game Pass to play your games on the console, meaning Valve will make zero dollars on game purchases from you.

This stark price difference could make the Steam Machine unpalatable to console gamers who are interested in switching to PC gaming through the living room PC console. After all, several tests reveal that the PlayStation outperforms the Steam Machine in several titles (although the Valve hardware still performed well enough). But the advantage that gamers are paying for in the Steam Machine is the abilities of a desktop PC (you can pretty much install anything you want on it without going through the Steam store and you don’t have to subscribe for online play), combined with the convenience of a living room console (like HDMI-CEC and the ability to switch the console on or off from the controller). Interested gamers will also likely have a library of titles ready to play.

Hopefully, the Steam Machine’s price will come down once the memory supply finally stabilizes, but it will probably be years before this happens, if at all. Valve’s new gaming console is quite a niche product — it’s built for PC gamers with an extensive Steam library who want to play games on their living room couch or while lying in bed without going through the hassle of building an SFF PC. But if you prefer playing games on your desk or already have a substantial game library on your PlayStation, you’re probably better off sticking with your current hardware.

Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a light-sensitive digital memory device that combines sensing, memory, and signal processing inside a single phototransistor, potentially reducing the energy cost of future AI hardware. The device, developed at Oregon State University’s College of Engineering and published in Advanced Functional Materials, is also designed to mimic the brain’s crucial ability to strengthen important memories while allowing less useful information to fade over time.

The new device brings AI processing closer to the sensor, rather than forcing data to travel between separate hardware blocks, so some of the work happens right where the light lands. "Our optoelectronic device introduces a new hardware capability that may enable more efficient processing of information directly at the sensor level," said Larry Cheng, project leader and professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Today's AI hardware splits sensing, memory, and processing — the key jobs involved in machine perception — across separate components, which means data has to constantly shuttle between them. This shuttling consumes energy and reduces efficiency.

The Oregon State device addresses this challenge by moving some memory and processing functions directly into the light sensor. It does this using a phototransistor made from two different materials. An oxide semiconductor forms the transistor channel, which is the pathway through which current flows. A photosensitive organic layer sits on top, absorbing light and generating electrical charges.

When light hits the device, some of those charges become trapped inside the photosensitive layer. Even after the light disappears, the trapped charges continue to affect the current flowing through the semiconductor channel. In effect, the device retains a memory of the optical signal it previously detected.

The clever part is that this memory is not static. By applying a small electrical gate voltage, the researchers can change where the trapped charges sit relative to the transistor channel. When the charges are moved closer to the channel, their effect becomes stronger, and the memory lasts longer. When they are moved farther away, the effect weakens, and the memory fades more quickly.

That behavior loosely resembles how biological brains regulate memory. In the brain, chemical signals influence whether a memory is reinforced or allowed to fade. In OSU’s device, an electrical signal performs a similar role, giving the hardware a programmable memory lifetime.

This could be especially useful for neuromorphic computing, a field that tries to build computing systems modeled on biological neural networks. It also fits into the broader push toward in-sensor computing, where data is processed at the point of capture rather than being shuttled off to separate processors and memory banks.

For AI vision systems, that could mean hardware capable of filtering, weighting, and temporarily retaining visual information before it ever reaches a conventional processor. A robot, drone, security camera, or autonomous system may not need to preserve every visual signal forever. Some information should matter briefly, some should matter longer, and some should disappear almost immediately.

“This light-sensitive memory with a programmable memory lifetime creates a tunable time window for processing visual and other sensor signals directly where they are detected, a capability that could enable more efficient vision systems and other sensor-based AI technologies,” Cheng said.

The research is still at the device level, so this is not a drop-in replacement for today’s AI accelerators or image sensors. However, it points toward hardware that could make future AI systems less dependent on constantly moving data between sensors, memory, and processors. If scaled successfully, that could help AI devices become faster, more compact, and less power-hungry, particularly in edge systems where energy efficiency matters most.

GoPro, the creator of the modern action camera, warned in a regulatory filing on June 1 that it faces “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue.” According to Digital Camera World, the news report comes as the camera manufacturer is pummeled on both sides by declining sales and increasing costs, particularly memory chips driven by a global AI shortage.

These action cameras do not have internal memory, meaning buyers must purchase their own microSD cards. So, even though these have skyrocketed in price, the only direct impact they would have on the company would be reduced sales because buyers are balking at the thought of buying a separate storage card. On the other hand, even though camera specifications do not list them, these cameras' processors require RAM.

GoPro, as a niche action camera maker, isn’t in a good position as smartphones have become better at photography and videography. Furthermore, it has faced stiff competition from the likes of DJI and Insta360, which also offer products such as drones and gimbals. While the FCC has banned the former from the U.S. market, the latter is still widely available.

The action camera company suffered a net loss of $432.3 million in 2024, while it managed to shrink this to $93.5 million last year. Unfortunately, GoPro saw reduced sales in April and May this year. When you pair that with the memory chip crisis, which has driven up RAM prices and made supply harder to find, it seems that GoPro is in real trouble.

This filing does not mean the company is in deep trouble just yet, but it publicly signals that it needs to address its situation — otherwise, it could lead to a complete disaster. “Without obtaining additional sources of financing or consummating a strategic transaction, the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern would be materially and adversely impacted,” GoPro said in its regulatory filing. “The Company may be required to significantly reduce, restructure, cease operations, or seek protection under the Federal bankruptcy laws, although no specific plans to file for bankruptcy protection have been initiated or considered.”

Since GoPro is a publicly traded company, it’s required by law to make notifications like this. Still, it does not mean the company cannot turn itself around before it runs out of cash. We’ve seen a few firms turn themselves around before they had to declare bankruptcy. However, because GoPro is focused on such a niche product, vagaries in the direction of its only market will have an outsized impact on its sales and revenue.

SK hynix will double its memory wafer capacity within five years, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters at Computex in Taipei on June 2nd, while repeating his forecast that the AI-driven shortage gripping the memory market will run until 2030. As reported by Bloomberg, Chey declined to put an exact dollar figure on the expansion, saying instead that the company's 2026 spending would climb well above the 30.2 trillion won (roughly $20 billion) it spent in 2025, and confirmed SK hynix has filed to list American depositary receipts in New York this year.

On its own timeline, the pledge will do little to shorten the squeeze. Chey put the lead time for a greenfield fab at more than five years, placing fresh output near the tail end of the shortage window that he’s predicting. This new stance is also a significant departure from his March comments at Nvidia’s GTC conference, where he said a new fab wasn’t planned and that capacity couldn’t be added on demand.

Chey also said the cost of the buildout is difficult to pin down because prices for land, equipment, and electricity keep moving, which is likely why no figure accompanied the announcement. With the company's existing lines already saturated, customers have offered to buy SK hynix's EUV scanners and prefund fab lines as available capacity has fallen to near zero. "Until 2030, there's still some shortage," Chey told reporters

Ultimately, it’s HBM that’s driving the massive gap between wafer supply and demand. HBM consumes far more wafers per bit than standard DRAM and carries the industry's highest margins, so capacity keeps tilting toward them. SK hynix holds about 57% of the HBM market and 32% of global DRAM, and Chey has said he wants the company to become a major HBM supplier for Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform and is seeking more manufacturing partnerships in Taiwan beyond TSMC.

But buyers aren’t waiting on new fabs for relief. TrendForce projected DRAM contract prices to rise 63% in the second quarter after climbing roughly 95% in the first, and DDR4 spot pricing ran up around 2,200% over 12 months before a recent decline. Even with capacity doubling, outlooks across the next five years are unchanged, and the market is likely to stay tight for the rest of the decade as things currently stand with AI demand.

Thousands of SK hynix employees fled their factory stations earlier today as a fire broke out in a room where fluorine gas was used. Yonhap News reports that seven of the workers have been hospitalized, five are being treated for eye irritation, and two are under observation (machine translation). At the time of writing, a cleanup operation appears to be continuing at SK hynix’s Cheongju 4th campus, with all 3,600 employees evacuated. A company official told Yonhap, “There are no issues with equipment operation, so there will be no production disruption.”

Reports indicate that the fire began at around 10.23 am Korean time today. An unintentional fire is probably not a great thing anywhere in an advanced semiconductor fab, even in the burgers and cigars wing. However, in “the gas room on the 6th floor connecting the M15 and M15X factories at SK Hynix's Cheongju 4th campus,” it could have been a particularly nasty incident. This room includes equipment/canisters/pipelines holding highly toxic fluorine gas.

According to the Korean news source, the fire in the gas room was extinguished immediately by sprinklers, but fluorine escaped into the room at a concentration estimated to be 5 ppm. This is where the seven hospitalized workers had been situated.

Fluorine gas is used in various industrial processes, but it is a highly reactive gas that can cause spontaneous combustion or explosions if it comes into contact with common materials. It is also quite deadly to humans. Wikipedia states that “significant irritation of the eyes and respiratory system as well as liver and kidney damage occur above 25 ppm… The eyes and nose are seriously damaged at 100 ppm… and inhalation of 1,000 ppm fluorine will cause death in minutes.”

Official insists there will be “no production disruption”

With the immense demand and pressure on memory-making titans like SK hynix, some may be concerned that a facility like Cheongju closing even for a few hours could impact supplies, schedules, pricing, and more. However, an official insisted, “There are no issues with equipment operation, so there will be no production disruption.” It was also suggested that the fire/leak occurred in the gas pipeline, but that fact had yet to be determined.

At the time of writing, there may still be environmental purification and repair work to do. If and when that’s completed, operatives will begin safety inspections, including air quality measurements. After the all-clear, “we plan to return the employees,” the official told Yonhap. We’ve linked to the latest report on this incident available at the source.

SK hynix announced iHBM today, a memory heat management technology designed to enhance AI system performance. The thermal packaging solution improves heat dissipation by integrating ICEs (integrated cooling elements) directly into the HBM package. SK hynix says the result is an over 30% reduction in thermal resistance, “ensuring stable operating characteristics even in high-temperature and high-load environments.”

The iHBM architecture embeds non-conductive silicon cooling elements directly into the Die-to-Die Physical Layer (D2D PHY), the critical, high-speed connection interface between the HBM base die and the AI processor, which is prone to high temperature spikes as a result of extreme data traffic. By placing cooling elements in this layer, SK hynix mitigates the severe thermal throttling that cripples AI system performance during heavy computational workloads.

The company believes that structurally preventing thermal throttling will enable next-generation memory layers (targeted for future generations like HBM5) to scale to higher stack heights and sustain maximum data transfer speeds under the heavy computational loads of AI data centers.

“iHBM is the optimal solution for minimizing heat generation developed by combining memory design capabilities and advanced packaging technology,” said SK hynix Vice President Lee Kang-wook. “We will proactively provide the value customers need in the AI environment and further solidify our leadership in AI memory.”

SK hynix plans to apply iHBM technology from next-generation products, such as HBM5, to meet the thermal management requirements of high-performance computing (HPC), AI data centers, and other ultra-high-density and ultra-high-bandwidth environments, thereby improving overall system stability and efficiency.

Heat management is one of the biggest challenges facing HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory) technology. Unlike conventional memory, HBM achieves massive bandwidth by vertically stacking multiple DRAM dies, dramatically shortening the distance data must travel and enabling far higher transfer speeds with better power efficiency.

To minimize latency and feed AI processors fast enough to avoid bottlenecks, HBM is placed extremely close to the GPU or AI accelerator on the same package, connected through a high-speed silicon interposer. However, this dense arrangement also creates severe thermal problems.

The Die-to-Die Physical Layer (D2D PHY) — the ultra-high-speed interface linking the processor and HBM stacks — continuously moves terabytes of data per second. As thousands of signaling lanes and billions of transistors switch at extremely high frequencies, switching losses, leakage current, and electrical resistance generate substantial heat.

The problem is compounded by the processor itself, which already produces enormous amounts of heat. With the HBM stacks packed tightly around the processor, heat accumulates rapidly in a very small area. When temperatures exceed safe limits, the system automatically reduces clock speeds and voltages through thermal throttling to prevent physical damage, lowering overall performance.

SK hynix's new iHBM approach attempts to tackle the problem at the structural level. Unlike conventional HBM cooling designs that primarily dissipate heat indirectly through the core die and surrounding package structures, the company's iHBM architecture instead places Integrated Cooling Elements (ICEs) directly around the D2D PHY region — the exact zone where thermal concentration is most severe. This approach creates a dedicated dissipation path at the source, reducing overall thermal resistance by 30% and allowing the chip to maintain stable operation under the high-temperature, high-pressure conditions that dense AI workloads demand.

SK hynix says the technology can be manufactured at scale using its existing Wafer Level Packaging (WLP) process, which is built on its Mass Reflow Molded Underfill (MR-MUF) packaging technology already used in commercial HBM products. The design is also architecturally compatible with existing System-in-Package configurations, meaning customers can integrate the new thermal capability without major redesigns.

A Redditor has caused a stir by coaxing a workstation build using Optane PMem DIMMs as RAM to run a 1-trillion-parameter LLM. APFrisco explains in a mini tutorial/guide on the Local LLaMA subreddit how they bought some used Intel Optane Persistent Memory, acquired relatively cheaply second-hand, to “run a 1 trillion parameter model (in this case Kimi K2.5) locally at ~4 tokens/second” on their Xeon workstation.

Central to the headlining feat was the Redditor’s sourcing of six Optane PMem (DCPMM) sticks. The discontinued memory format was designed to bridge the DRAM-SSD divide. While the 768GB of Optane (6x 128GB) does indeed offer far lower latency than the best NVMe SSDs, it is still two or three times slower than DRAM. These characteristics are still rather sweet for LLM inference frameworks, and the second-hand price was “much less than what the equivalent DRAM capacity would cost.” But, alas, Optane is dead, so this is an exotic solution.

APFrisco’s hardware specs were given as follows:

• Intel Xeon Gold 6246 CPU
• Tyan S5630GMRE-CGN motherboard
• Asus Dual GeForce RTX 3060 OC 12GB GPU
• 6x 32GB Samsung 2666MHz DDR4 ECC DRAM sticks
• 6x 128GB Intel Optane DCPMM PC4-2666 NMA1XBD128GQS persistent memory modules
• Western Digital WD SN850X 2TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD
• ASRock Steel Legend SL-850G 850W 80 PLUS GOLD & Cybenetics Platinum Fully Modular Power Supply
• Silverstone SST-GD08B (Black) Grandia Series Home Theater PC Case

The build was configured with the Optane in memory mode and the Samsung DDR4 as cache.

The software side of the equation relied on the aforementioned Kimi K2.5’s mixture-of-experts architecture. APFrisco used a hybrid GPU/CPU inference methodology with llama.cpp. Also, to optimize processing, the routing components were shoehorned into the 12GB GPU using llama.cpp’s 'override-tensor' flag.

The Redditor is rather proud of the resulting ~4 tokens per second performance. “Given the fact that this is a trillion-parameter frontier-class model running on such a limited hardware budget, I would consider it to be a great success,” writes APFrisco. They go on to lament Intel’s withdrawal of Optane products.

If you are interested in this rig rundown and what it achieved in terms of local LLM inference, you can find some more details about the configuration in the source post. Furthermore, APFrisco sticks around in the comments to answer questions. They also appear to benefit from recommendations about how to achieve even better results, given the foundation they have laid.

The bigger picture, though, seems to be that there is room for a memory product in the chasm between DRAM and SSDs, particularly for LLMs. Many expect that the gap will soon be bridged by the CXL (Compute Express Link) standard, which promises huge pools of affordable, byte‑addressable memory for these kinds of workloads.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo say they have demonstrated a non-volatile magnetic switching device capable of flipping states in just 40 picoseconds while consuming unusually little power and generating far less heat than many previous ultrafast switching approaches — potentially addressing one of the biggest problems facing modern AI hardware: the enormous energy and cooling demands created by moving and storing data.

The researchers built the device using an antiferromagnetic material called manganese-tin (Mn₃Sn), then showed that ultrashort electrical pulses could reliably switch its magnetic state while retaining the stored information after power removal. They also demonstrated similar switching using ultrafast photocurrent pulses generated from a telecom-band laser and photodiode, effectively converting optical signals directly into memory-writing electrical pulses.

At its most fundamental level, modern computing is really the science of switching physical states. Every operation inside a computer — whether running a game, training an AI model, opening a browser tab, or loading a file from storage — ultimately involves billions or trillions of tiny physical state changes. Transistors switch on and off, memory cells charge and discharge, cache states update, data moves through interconnects, and storage cells trap or release electrons.

Those switching events are what physically represent binary information. The problem is that switching states requires energy, and almost all of that energy eventually becomes heat. That reality is becoming increasingly problematic in the AI era. Modern AI accelerators process enormous volumes of data. But much of their power consumption comes not just from computation itself, but from constantly moving and refreshing information between caches, memory, storage, and interconnects. As GPU clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of accelerators, power delivery and cooling are becoming some of the industry's biggest bottlenecks.

Current memory technologies all handle switching differently, but each comes with major tradeoffs. DRAM — the main system memory used in PCs, servers, and GPUs — stores information as electrical charge inside tiny capacitors. A charged capacitor represents one state, while a discharged capacitor represents another. However, those capacitors constantly leak charge, meaning the system must repeatedly refresh the memory cells thousands of times per second simply to preserve data. That constant re-switching consumes significant power and generates heat, even when systems are relatively idle.

Flash memory used in SSDs avoids that problem by trapping electrons in floating-gate structures, which retain data without continuous power. On the other hand, changing those states is slower and more energy-intensive, making flash unsuitable for high-speed working memory.

SRAM, used inside CPU caches, achieves extremely fast switching using transistor feedback circuits that continuously maintain state. But SRAM consumes significant chip area and power, making it expensive and difficult to scale to large capacities.

The industry has spent decades searching for a kind of "universal memory" that could combine the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM, the persistence of flash, and low power consumption. That challenge becomes even harder at ultrafast timescales, where many experimental switching technologies partially rely on brute-force heating to destabilize and flip states rapidly.

The faster the switching, the more severe the thermal problem often becomes. Several previously demonstrated picosecond-scale switching approaches cited in the paper involve temperature rises of several hundred Kelvin during operation.

The Tokyo researchers are instead pursuing a radically different switching mechanism through a field known as spintronics. Instead of storing information as an electrical charge, spintronic devices store information using magnetic states.

Conventional magnetic memories typically use ferromagnets — materials such as iron, cobalt, or nickel in which magnetic moments align in the same direction. The new device instead uses an antiferromagnetic material called Mn₃Sn, where neighboring magnetic moments largely cancel one another out.

Researchers are interested in antiferromagnets because they can potentially switch much faster, resist magnetic interference more effectively, and scale to smaller dimensions without generating large stray magnetic fields.

The researchers fabricated layered Mn₃Sn/Ta structures on silicon substrates and then used ultrafast electrical pulses to flip the material between two stable magnetic configurations, representing binary states.

Crucially, the switching mechanism is not primarily based on heating the material. Instead, the pulses generate what is known as spin-orbit torque — a process that transfers angular momentum directly into the magnetic structure itself, flipping the magnetic state without requiring extreme temperature spikes.

That distinction is the paper's central claim. The research is not merely about creating a new kind of memory, but about finding a potentially more energy-efficient way to switch digital states themselves. Currently, almost all electrical energy consumed by computing hardware eventually becomes heat. Modern AI infrastructure is already hitting serious power and cooling limits as GPU clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of accelerators.

The team's device reportedly achieved switching in just 40 picoseconds — roughly 1,000 times faster than typical nanosecond-scale memory switching. Normally, pushing switching speeds into the picosecond regime causes heat generation to spike dramatically, as systems often rely partly on intense transient heating to destabilize states quickly enough for reversal.

However, simulations in one device configuration showed temperature rises of only about 8 K (14.4°F) during switching, supporting the researchers' claim that the mechanism relies primarily on direct angular-momentum transfer rather than brute-force thermal switching. This also confirms that the Mn₃Sn device may avoid much of the heat problem that has plagued earlier ultrafast memory research.

The optical switching demonstration may also prove important for future data-center architectures. The researchers generated 60-picosecond photocurrent pulses using a telecom-band laser and photodiode, then used those pulses to switch the device's magnetic state.

That could eventually align with broader industry efforts toward optical interconnects and silicon photonics, where hyperscalers are increasingly seeking ways to move information using light rather than conventional electrical signaling.

If technologies like this ever become commercially viable, they could theoretically reduce memory refresh overhead, lower cooling requirements, reduce idle power draw, and potentially blur the distinction between memory and storage. For personal computing, that could someday translate into systems that retain working memory contents without standby power, resume instantly, and generate less heat. For hyperscale AI infrastructure, the implications would center more around power efficiency and cooling reduction across massive GPU clusters.

For now, however, the technology remains firmly experimental. The current devices are tiny laboratory structures rather than manufacturable memory chips, and the paper notes that the present implementation still requires an external bias magnetic field for deterministic switching — a major practical limitation for commercial hardware.

Manufacturing scalability, endurance validation, cost competitiveness, and integration with existing CMOS manufacturing processes also remain unresolved. The history of computing is full of promising "next-generation memory" technologies that never displaced mature DRAM or NAND ecosystems. Even so, the work highlights the growing reality in the computing industry that future performance gains may depend less on shrinking transistors and more on reducing the energy required to physically switch, move, and store information.

Several Taiwanese memory module manufacturers, including Adata and TeamGroup, are collectively raising more than NT$28 billion (approximately $880 million) through convertible bonds, syndicated bank loans, and private share placements to fund chip purchases, according to a report from Taiwan's Commercial Times. The fundraising reflects how expensive it has become for downstream companies to maintain adequate inventory as DRAM and NAND flash contract prices continue to rise quarter after quarter.

Adata is the largest single borrower in the group, having completed a NT$2 billion convertible bond issuance and secured NT$12 billion in bank loans, and is planning a 30 million-share private placement, per the outlet’s reporting.

GoldKey Technology raised NT$4.5 billion through a combination of bonds and loans, while Team Group and Apacer completed NT$2 billion and NT$1 billion convertible bond issuances, respectively. Innodisk and Transcend are each planning NT$3 billion in convertible bonds, and Silicon Power is preparing a NT$500 million issuance.

It’s frankly astounding that these highly profitable companies are having to raise capital at this scale just to secure a sufficient chip inventory. In March, Adata’s revenue exceeded NT$10 billion for the first time, and its Q1 total of NT$26.11 billion more than doubled year over year, according to the company's monthly revenue disclosures. Meanwhile, Team Group posted NT$4.92 billion in revenue in the same month, a 326% sequential increase. The Commercial Times noted that several module makers' cumulative revenue through April had already surpassed their full-year 2025 totals.

Fundraising efforts are being driven by the sheer cost of maintaining chip inventory during a sustained price surge. Adata chairman Simon Chen told the Taipei Times in March that the company had accumulated NT$30 billion worth of chip inventory by the end of February and was targeting more than NT$35 billion by the end of March. He also said cloud service providers had recently approached Adata to sign long-term supply agreements, which he described as "a rare occurrence."

Contract prices have risen sharply across every memory category in the last year. TrendForce has estimated that conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90% to 95% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026, with a further 58% to 63% increase expected in Q2. NAND flash contracts climbed roughly 60% in Q1, and TrendForce projected a 70% to 75% increase for Q2. More recent TrendForce data from early May revised mobile DRAM pricing for Q2 upward to 93% to 98% quarter over quarter, as Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix finalize negotiations with customers.

Memory manufacturers continue to prioritize high-margin server DRAM and HBM production over consumer and mobile applications, and new fab capacity isn’t expected to come online in volume before late 2027 at the earliest.

Module makers, which buy finished chips from those manufacturers and assemble them into DIMMs, SSDs, and other products, have limited ability to influence allocation; stockpiling inventory through debt financing is one of the few levers available to them.

75 years ago this week, on May 11th, 1951, MIT electrical engineer Jay Forrester filed the patent application for coincident-current magnetic core memory, a technology that became the dominant form of random-access storage in digital computers for two decades.

Granted as U.S. Patent 2736880 in February 1956, Forrester's invention evolved from MIT's Project Whirlwind, where unreliable vacuum-tube memory was failing to meet the demands of real-time Cold War air defense.

Whirlwind began in the mid-1940s as a U.S. Navy flight simulator project but pivoted toward real-time digital computing. The machine needed to track aircraft in flight, and the electrostatic storage tubes Forrester initially used broke down constantly.

Forrester's solution used tiny rings of ferrite material, each about the diameter of a pencil lead, strung on a grid of copper wires. Sending current through two intersecting wires simultaneously magnetized a specific ring in one direction for a "1" or the other for a "0." The coincident-current technique allowed a small number of wires to address millions of bits in three-dimensional arrays. His graduate student, William Papian, built the first prototype in October 1950, and the first full core memory bank went into Whirlwind on August 8th, 1953.

This demonstrated that the underlying tech worked, and Whirlwind subsequently became the prototype for the SAGE air defense network, which operated 23 computer-controlled radar installations across the United States and one in Canada, and remained operational into the 1980s.

While Forrester applied for the patent in 1951, it took five years for it to be granted, and a series of legal battles soon followed. RCA engineer Jan Rajchman had filed a similar application eight months earlier, and Harvard researcher An Wang had separately patented a different core memory technique that IBM purchased in 1955 for $500,000. Wang used the proceeds to expand Wang Laboratories.

IBM then spent years challenging Forrester's broader patent. MIT responded with forensic thoroughness, according to its archival records, tracing purchase orders, examining telephone bills and travel vouchers, and analyzing lab notebooks to establish Forrester's priority. RCA eventually withdrew its claims, and in 1964, IBM settled for $13 million, the largest patent payout in history at the time. Forrester personally received $1.5 million.

Forrester left digital computing in 1956, the same year his patent was granted, joining MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he founded the field of system dynamics. He died on November 16th, 2016, at 98.

A tech enthusiast has combined an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB) with defective memory and an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (16GB) with a damaged GPU. The result was a working RTX 3070 with 16GB of VRAM. While the mod by ComputerBase reader AssassinWarlord seems like a great success, especially in VRAM-hungry modern AAA gaming, there are a couple of small wrinkles to be aware of.

A memory boost for the RTX 3070 is an upgrade that would make many people happy. While the RTX 3070 GPU is significantly more potent than its little brother, the RTX 3060 12GB, modern titles have started to hit the boundaries of the VRAM more often. This may be one of the reasons that rumors are swirling about a reanimated RTX 3060 arriving in the coming months, rather than the RTX 3070.

Back to the mod details, and AssassinWarlord started by taking the eight BGA memory chips off both donor cards, then reballed the ICs. Desoldering and reballing chips like these isn't for the casual hobbyist, so we'd characterize AssassinWarlord as a high-level tech tweaker. They also 3D printed a bracket for a GDDR6 reballing stencil... Commenting on the hardware aspect of the process, the intrepid modder summed up that it was "actually not that difficult, the whole thing." (machine translation from German). However, a little bit more effort was needed, such as a resistor change to get the system to see 16GB of VRAM, and a VRAM config switch would be added later.

AssassinWarlord commented that, as well as jumpers for different VRAM chip brands, the original RTX 3070 design was fine with 16Gb Samsung memory ICs (so, 8x 2 GB chips), which are needed to configure the graphics card with 16GB of VRAM total.

No extra software or hardware mods were needed to successfully test the RTX 3070 16GB in modern Windows tools and games, but a wrinkle remained in this otherwise perfect mod, which works with standard GeForce drivers. In short, the system would black screen after closing a tool that stressed the GPU subsystem.

Some investigative work indicated that memory timings set in BIOS were the underlying problem in the 16GB configuration. A RegEdit 'DisableDynamicPstate' solution to this issue was produced, meaning the GPU wasn't downclocked (or black screens) after being taxed, but this results in an idling power consumption of approximately 70W.

The forum source thread contains a few before and after synthetic benchmarks with various GPU and memory clocks tested. But it is only really in some modern games that we get to see the true advantage of the RTX 3070 16GB. Specifically, AssassinWarlord tested Marvel's Spider-Man 2 like-for-like (4K Very High) with the 8GB and 16GB switch modes. The frame rate doubles from the ~20 fps region to 40 fps+ with the 16GB enabled - see below.

We've seen a couple of RTX 3070 modded to 16GB VRAM projects before. However, AssassinWarlord's effort is admirable for making use of two non-working cards to make one very usable model. Moreover, the hardware switch, 16GB script, and the avoidance of any need for modded drivers are appreciated.

Government-mediated negotiations between Samsung Electronics and its largest labor union fell apart on Wednesday, according to Reuters, leaving just eight days before an 18-day strike that could shut down much of the world's biggest memory chip operation. The union warned that it is “no longer considering additional negotiations” until after the proposed general strike.

South Korean Prime Minister Kim Min-seok responded by convening an emergency ministerial meeting, instructing officials to closely manage the situation given what his office called the potential gravity of the impact on the national economy.

The breakdown followed two days of marathon talks brokered by South Korea's National Labor Relations Commission. The commission said it ended proceedings because of the gulf between the two sides and the union's own request to suspend discussions.

JPMorgan has estimated that an 18-day work stoppage would cost Samsung over 4 trillion won in direct revenue, roughly 1% of its semiconductor division's annual sales. Professor Song Heon-jae of the University of Seoul puts the figure higher, projecting losses of approximately 1 trillion won ($700 million) per day from factory shutdowns, Seoul Economic Daily reported on April 26. Meanwhile, the union's own estimate sits at up to 30 trillion won ($20.3 billion) in total damages.

Samsung has offered a one-time payment for 2026 but refused to commit to permanent changes in how bonuses are calculated, according to union representative Choi Seung-ho. That fell fundamentally short of the union’s demands, which include the scrapping of a cap on bonus pay currently set at 50% of base salary, and the allocation of 15% of annual operating profit to performance payouts.

While Choi said the union doesn’t plan to resume talks before the May 21st strike date, it would consider a new offer if Samsung puts one forward. Samsung said it regretted the outcome and would continue seeking dialogue.

“We spent 16 out of the 17 hours of mediation simply waiting around,” Choi said, according to Korea JoongAng Daily. “We declared the negotiations over because management kept extending the mediation without making any meaningful changes to its proposal, which appeared to be an attempt to weaken momentum for a general strike.”

The collapse has raised the prospect of an emergency arbitration order, a legal mechanism that would immediately freeze industrial action for 30 days while the labor commission mediates. South Korean Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon stopped short of invoking it on Wednesday, saying the dispute should be resolved through dialogue. The union has warned that such an order would damage labor relations further.

The tool has rarely been used, and doing so would be an unusual step for the current administration, which is friendly towards unions, but the economic stakes are substantial: semiconductors accounted for 37% of South Korea's total exports in April, up from 20% a year earlier, according to government data cited by Reuters.

The union now counts more than 90,000 members, representing over 70% of Samsung's South Korean workforce. That figure has grown from roughly 73,000 earlier this month and 32,000 during Samsung's first-ever strike in 2024. A one-day walkout in April offered a preview of what a full stoppage could do: Samsung's memory fab output fell 18% on the affected shift, and contract foundry production dropped 58%. With a potential 18-day strike, the losses in production and profit could be even larger.

Apple, arguably the largest phone and computer manufacturer in the world, isn’t immune to the chip shortage, as it once again reduced the highest memory capacity available for the Mac Studio and Mac Mini. Apple's Mac Studio could be configured with up to 512GB of Unified Memory at launch, which is more than enough for professional usage and local AI applications.

Now, if you visit the Apple Store, you can only purchase the Mac Studio with a maximum of 96GB of Unified Memory, while the Mac mini is only available with up to 48GB (down from 64GB).

Apple's Unified Memory architecture has become popular for running local AI models and agentic AI applications like OpenClaw. When the latter exploded in popularity in early 2026, many AI developers and enthusiasts jumped at the opportunity to acquire a small PC with a very high memory pool. This resulted in a shortage that pushed delivery times from six days to six weeks.

This situation, combined with the global memory chip shortage, has forced Apple to discontinue the 512GB SKU and increase the price of the 256GB upgrade to $2,000 in early March. However, the increase in price did not dissuade buyers, as company chief Tim Cook warned during the company’s latest earnings call that supplies for both the Mac Studio and Mac mini could remain constrained for months.

Despite the increased prices and the removal of higher-capacity versions, delivery times for both the Mac Studio and Mac Mini haven’t improved. The M4 Max Mac Studio with 64GB of Unified Memory can take six to seven weeks to deliver, while all other configurations, including the 36GB and 96GB variants, can take between nine and 10 weeks. Prospective buyers of the M4 Mac mini with 16GB of Unified Memory may fare slightly better, with a three-to-four-week delivery window; this worsens to 10 to 12 weeks if you upgrade the memory to 24GB or 48GB.

We’re also starting to see shortages affect high-capacity MacBooks. While 24GB and lower-capacity MacBook Air laptops are still thankfully readily available, you need to wait about two to three weeks if you want the 32GB version. 48GB versions and up of the MacBook Pro also now entail a wait of one to two weeks, while even the budget MacBook Neo, which became insanely popular among students and entry-level buyers, takes around two to three weeks to deliver.

Cook said during the company’s first earnings call of 2026 that the company is chasing memory supply and that it will have a greater impact on its Q2 earnings. We’re now feeling the brunt of the shortage, as we see Macs, high-capacity MacBooks, and the entry-level MacBook Neo experience extended delivery times. Thankfully, mid-range buyers can still easily acquire the standard iMac, entry-level MacBook Airs, and MacBook Pros.

Samsung’s production numbers reportedly plummeted significantly during a one-day strike by the company’s labor union. According to Seoul Economic Daily, citing union officials, the company’s memory fab output fell by 18% while its contract chip foundry plunged by 58.1%. These numbers only affected the night shift after the April 23 strike, with the “Joint Struggle Headquarters” saying that it will conduct a larger 18-day labor action if company management fails to reach a deal with workers. The union estimates that the walkout, which would last for more than two weeks, will cost the company KRW 30 trillion, or over $20 billion. It also threatened to mobilize personnel assigned to the fabs’ “safety protection facilities.”

The disagreement between the union and management stems from the company’s refusal to allocate 15% of its operating profit as a bonus for its workers, amounting to around $27 billion (about KRW 40 trillion), and would net chip fab workers around $400,000 each. Aside from this, the union also demanded a 7% increase in pay and a removal of the 50% bonus cap. The management made a counteroffer of a 10% operating profit bonus, 6.2% wage increase, and preferential mortgage loans, among other benefits, but it seems that this wasn’t enough for the union.

The group pointed out that SK hynix, Samsung’s biggest domestic chip rival, has given its workers a performance bonus amounting to 10% of its annual operating profit and removed the cap on the amount. This means that their bonuses only equate to less than 30% of what the SK hynix workers get, even though Samsung is 60% larger in terms of market capitalization.

Initial estimates from the police suggested that over 30,000 people attended the strike, but the union said that about 40,000 of its members were present in yesterday's action. This is a massive number and is said to represent nearly a third of the company’s semiconductor fab workforce. A general strike lasting several days would cripple operations, reducing Samsung’s advantage of being the first company to mass-produce and deliver HBM4 memory to its customers. It could also potentially exacerbate the global memory chip shortage, resulting in longer delivery times and potentially higher prices for everyone.

Unless the two sides come to an agreement, the union will kick off the general strike on May 21. Supra-Company Union Samsung Electronics chapter head Choi Seung-ho also said that he has submitted a notice to the Seoul Yongsan Police Station that the group will hold a rally in front of the residence of Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong on the same day.

The spot price of a 16GB DDR4 chip slipped roughly 5% over the past month to around $74.10, the first monthly decline since February 2025 and the first crack in a rally that pushed the same part from around $3.20 a year earlier, according to DigiTimes. This marks a notable decline from the 2,200% increase in pricing seen earlier this year.

16GB DDR5 fell by a comparable amount to roughly $37.20 over the same period, with the sharpest drops showing up in Chinese channel listings and on Amazon, where some 32GB DDR5 kits came down by as much as 30%. Even after the pullback, 16GB DDR4 is trading at more than 20 times its price just 12 months ago.

None of this has reached the contract market, where PC OEMs and system builders actually source memory. TrendForce's latest survey, which we covered last week, projects another 58% to 63% quarter-on-quarter rise in conventional DRAM contract prices in Q2 2026 and a 70% to 75% jump in NAND Flash, following record Q1 increases of 90% to 95% on DRAM.

DigiTimes reported that neither the three major suppliers nor Chinese memory makers CXMT and YMTC have eased pricing, and that customers are still signing long-term supply agreements. Spot sales represent a small fraction of total memory shipments, so a correction in channel listings has little direct bearing on OEM pricing.

It’s the Chinese channel that has moved the most, however, with DigiTimes reporting 32GB DDR5 kits down 27% over the month, while 8GB and 16GB DDR4 modules posted weekly declines of 25% in data the outlet attributed to China Flash Market.

Two factors appear to be driving the sell-off. First is that distributors who had built inventory at the top of the rally began clearing it once smaller module vendors ran out of headroom to pass costs downstream. Weak consumer demand has been a running theme since late 2025, when Samsung signed a non-cancellable DDR4 supply agreement that wouldn’t flow through to consumer buyers.

The second factor is Google's TurboQuant announcement in late March, a memory compression technique the company's research arm claims can cut key-value cache memory use during large language model inference by a factor of at least six. DigiTimes said the disclosure prompted some stockpilers to unload positions on concern that hyperscaler memory demand could soften if similar techniques reached production at scale.

DDR3 and legacy MLC NAND continue to climb despite the broader spot-side cooling, tracking the end-of-life pricing pattern we’ve seen as manufacturers pull the plug on DRAM in the pursuit of AI profits. Several suppliers are exiting those nodes entirely, and tight residual supply tends to support pricing on the way out. Retail DDR5 kit listings remain volatile, with triple and, in some cases, quadruple increases over the last three months.

SemiAnalysis estimates that memory will account for roughly 30% of total hyperscaler capex in calendar year 2026, up from approximately 8% in CY23 and CY24. The firm projects that share will climb further in CY27, representing a near four-fold shift in just four years as DRAM prices surge beyond imagination and HBM remains massively undersupplied.

SemiAnalysis expects DRAM prices to more than double in CY26, with another double-digit ASP increase in CY27. LPDDR5 contract pricing has already risen more than three times since Q1 2025, and the firm estimates open-market pricing will likely exceed $10/GB this quarter.

HBM, the vertically stacked memory at the core of AI accelerators, remains undersupplied through CY27 according to SemiAnalysis’s findings, with memory now constituting a massive share of the approximately $250 billion in incremental hyperscaler spend projected for this calendar year.

This is already reflected in AI server pricing, with SemiAnalysis noting that B200 prices are set to rise by up to 20% by year-end, driven in large part by memory cost inflation. That aligns with the broader industry, with manufacturers having acknowledged steep component cost increases in recent earnings calls. Dell's COO, Jeff Clarke, described the rate of cost movement as "unprecedented" in its Q325 earnings call back in November.

Counterpoint Research has separately projected that DDR5 64GB RDIMM modules could cost twice as much by the end of 2026 as they did in early 2025. AI servers built on Nvidia's LPDDR-based platforms are seeing some of the steepest increases because of the sheer volume of memory per system.

An interesting dynamic SemiAnalysis noted is that Nvidia receives what the firm calls "VVP" (Very Very Preferred) DRAM pricing from suppliers, “well below [the rates paid by] both hyperscalers and the broader market.” This, according to SemiAnalysis, compresses Nvidia's own server cost exposure and pushes down overall market pricing benchmarks, masking how severe the supply crunch actually is for everyone else.

AMD sits on the other side of that dynamic, with its AI accelerator SKUs generally carrying higher memory content per unit, and the company doesn’t benefit from the same preferential supplier pricing. At a time when AMD operates at far lower AI accelerator volume than Nvidia, making AMD “structurally more exposed [to memory cost inflation] at a time when it operates at far lower AI accelerator scale.” In other words, Nvidia's purchasing scale across HBM and conventional DRAM gives it leverage that smaller-volume buyers simply can’t replicate.

SemiAnalysis concluded that while memory inflation is already partially reflected in CY26 capex guidance from major cloud operators, CY27 repricing is not yet captured in Wall Street estimates. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have all diverted production capacity toward HBM and high-margin enterprise DRAM, leaving conventional DDR5 and LPDDR5 supply constrained, and new fab capacity from Micron's $9.6 billion Hiroshima HBM facility and SK hynix's Icheon and Cheongju expansions won’t be delivering meaningful output until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said that cars will eventually require more than 300GB of RAM as automakers introduce vehicles that have L4 autonomy. According to The Register, Mehrotra said this after Micron released its quarterly earnings report, with the company reporting $23.86 billion in revenue for the second quarter of this year — a huge 200% jump from the $8.03 billion it posted in 2Q25. This massive jump is still driven by the incredible demand for premium HBM chips from AI hyperscalers combined with “structural supply constraints and Micron’s strong execution across the board.”

As the company is raking cash from the AI infrastructure build out, it’s also expanding its output with several planned fabs in Japan, Singapore, and even a “megafab” in New York. These projects are expected to come online between 2028 and 2029, and the Micron CEO said that it’s looking to boost output by 20% in 2026, which could help alleviate some of the pressure on the supply side. However, even as these new factories start production, Mehrotra predicts that there will be a new market that demands massive amounts of high-speed memory — self-driving cars.

There are six levels of vehicle autonomy, starting at L0 for cars that have no driving automation whatsoever. A vehicle with a single automated system (such as cruise control) counts as L1, while those equipped with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that both control steering and acceleration, such as Tesla’s Autopilot and Cadillac’s Super Cruise, are considered as L2. On the other hand, vehicles with L4 autonomy basically do not need human intervention in any task, like overtaking or deciding when to cross a busy intersection. However, it still gives the driver the option to take control and manually drive the vehicle.

Nvidia announced that it’s working with Chinese carmakers BYD and Geely and Japanese marques Isuzu and Nissan to adopt the Nvidia Drive Hyperion platform. This is the AI chip maker’s end-to-end autonomous vehicle platform meant to deliver an L4 system to car manufacturers. Since this is an AI system, it will likely demand a lot of high-speed memory to be able to run effectively.

Most modern vehicles require at least 16GB of memory, but if car makers introduce L4 autonomy, it will definitely need a lot more RAM. We’ve seen this with the shortage of high-end Macs with up to 512GB of Unified Memory as many users have become interested in running the likes of OpenClaw on their own systems. It has even gotten to the point that Apple pulled the $4,000 512GB Mac Studio from its online store and raised the 256GB version to $2,000. So, if carmakers started churning out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of vehicles with AI-powered driverless features, Micron expects demand for automotive memory to pick up as well.

This might take some time to happen, though, especially as vehicles with these features are quite expensive and regulations haven’t quite caught up with L4 autonomy just yet. But if and when people start buying cars like these, we hope that memory chip makers have excess capacity to absorb the increase in demand. Otherwise, we might be seeing another round of memory chip shortages, this time driven by AI supercomputers on wheels.

With the AI boom driving up memory prices globally, Corsair is running a limited-time promotion offering a 25% discount on DDR5 memory kits. Considering prices have increased by as much as 300%, the rebate may not provide significant relief, especially if you opt for higher speeds with lower latency. Lower capacity kits, on the other hand, like the Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR5 6000 MHz CL36 kit, priced at $259.99, can be purchased for around $195 after discount. While that might not sound terrible, it is important to note that the same kit was selling for under $100 six months ago.

Check out the Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR5 6000 MHz deal on Corsair.com

Check out the Corsair Vengeance 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 6000 MHz deal on Corsair.com

Check out the Corsair Vengeance 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 5600 MHz deal on Corsair.com

If you’re still interested, head over to Corsair’s official website and use the code “DDR5-25” at checkout to take advantage of the offer. According to Corsair, the promotion applies across Corsair’s DDR5 lineup, including Vengeance and Dominator series modules, and is valid until March 26. The company also notes that the promotion cannot be stacked with any existing discounts.

Memory prices continue to soar, with no signs of relief in the near future. Earlier this month, a report by DigiTimes highlighted how the global memory market is becoming increasingly volatile, with DRAM prices now fluctuating on an almost hourly basis due to the AI-driven supply crunch. Apparently, large buyers, including cloud providers, automakers, and smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung, have gained priority access to memory by leveraging their scale and upfront payments. This has resulted in small and mid-sized firms scrambling for limited supply while being forced to pay much higher prices or cut back operations.

Recently, TrendForce revised its Q1 2026 conventional DRAM contract price outlook, increasing its forecast from a 55–60% quarter-over-quarter rise to a steep 90–95%. The firm expects PC DRAM prices to more than double quarter-over-quarter, marking a new quarterly record. At the same time, NAND flash contract prices are projected to climb by around 55–60%, which is also significantly higher than the earlier estimate of 33–38%.

Ultimately, short-term discounts like Corsair’s may sound attractive, but with supply increasingly tied up by AI-driven demand and pricing remaining on the higher end, both consumers and PC manufacturers may have to adjust to a new normal where memory is no longer an affordable component.

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters at Nvidia's GTC conference in San Jose on Monday that the global memory chip shortage is likely to persist for another four to five years, with industry-wide wafer supply lagging demand by more than 20%, Bloomberg reported. Chey, whose conglomerate controls SK Hynix, said leading memory makers are expanding capacity but are unlikely to fully meet demand until around 2030 because securing additional wafers takes at least four to five years, according to The Korea Times.

Chey warned that excessive focus on high-bandwidth memory could lead to shortages in conventional DRAM, potentially affecting smartphones and PCs. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron have shifted production in recent years toward HBM for AI accelerators, and the resulting shortfall in conventional DRAM output has driven steep price increases across consumer electronics.

SK Hynix holds roughly 57% of the global HBM market and 32% of overall DRAM, and the company is currently building a $13 billion HBM packaging and testing facility at its Cheongju complex in South Korea, with construction scheduled to begin next month and completion targeted for the end of 2027.

Samsung, meanwhile, is expanding DRAM capacity at its Pyeongtaek campus, with its P5 facility expected online by 2028. Micron is also planning a $9.6 billion HBM facility in Hiroshima, but initial output is not expected until 2028 either. Nearly all new capex is going toward HBM lines, where margins are highest.

Chey said SK Hynix is preparing measures to help stabilize DRAM prices, and that CEO Kwak Noh-jung is expected to announce a plan soon. He didn’t elaborate on what those measures would involve, though.

Gartner on February 26 projected global PC shipments will fall 10.4% and smartphone shipments 8.4% in 2026 compared to 2025 levels, driven by what the firm estimates will be a 130% surge in combined DRAM and SSD prices by the end of the year.

This, Gartner says, will lead to price increases of 17% among PCs year-over-year, leading to PC lifetimes extending by 15% for business users and 20% for consumers by the end of 2026, with the entry-level market facing the worst of it.

Seagate CCO Ban-Seng Teh said this week that memory price hikes had become "the new normal" for the storage industry, describing current market conditions as a supercycle driven by AI data center demand that shows no sign of following historical patterns of recovery.

"It's hard to tell if it will last forever," Teh told the South China Morning Post, adding that the current cycle was "very unusual because in the past we went through cycles of shortage and oversupply.”

Seagate has obviously felt the pressure of spiralling memory prices, with Teh confirming that the company has “definitely seen increasing costs” from rising DRAM prices, though he noted its own DRAM consumption was modest relative to PC makers or hyperscale data center operators.

According to TrendForce, server DRAM contract prices were forecast to surge roughly 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, the steepest single-quarter increase on record. What’s worse is that TrendForce revised that figure upward from an earlier estimate of 55-60%, citing worsening supply-demand imbalances as cloud service providers continued pulling forward orders to secure allocations. PC DRAM prices are also forecast to more than double QoQ over the same period, also a record.

Although Seagate may use less DRAM than other customers, there's no way it can avoid these rising costs or the subsequent price hikes necessary to maintain its margins.

DRAM isn't the only source of price pressure for Seagate, either. Volatile oil prices caused by recent conflict in the Middle East — crude briefly surged to a four-year high of nearly $120 a barrel in the past few days before retreating below $100 — have also complicated Seagate's logistics. Teh says the company is actively reviewing shipment routing in response to that crisis.

Despite the cost pressures, Seagate is riding the same wave of AI demand that is driving memory prices up. Teh said annual growth in data storage demand, which his team had expected to stay below 20% five years ago, is instead expanding in the mid-20s percentage range.

That growth has pushed the industry toward higher areal densities, and Seagate this month began shipping its Mozaic 4+ platform, the company's next-generation hard drive using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology, to two unnamed hyperscale cloud providers at capacities up to 44TB per drive. According to Seagate CEO Dave Mosley, the company's nearline hard drive capacity is on allocation through the end of 2026, with supply agreements in place with major cloud customers extending into 2027. Combined with Teh's perspective, that suggests consumers looking for a break from high storage prices are unlikely to see relief any time soon.

A Mozilla engineer has shared survey data and calculations suggesting that up to 15% of Firefox crashes are due to a bit flip. For the purposes of this report, a bit flip occurs when a memory cell (RAM, cache, etc) updates its value from 0 to 1, or vice-versa, following some unintentional external input. The most common triggers for bit flips are thought to be electrical issues and instability, thermal effects, underlying manufacturing defects and aging, crosstalk, and even memory cells being flipped by an ionizing cosmic ray.

No one seems to have a hard figure for the biggest bit flip contributor. However, systems sent to space will use specialized components hardened to resist interference from cosmic radiation, extremes of temperature, etc, and to include aggressive error checking.

The Mozilla team received nearly half a million auto-submitted crash reports last week (opt-in feature). Data from a recently introduced “memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes,” guided senior engineer Gabriele Svelto towards his eyebrow-raising bit flips, causing 15% of crashes figure, which he admits “dwarfs all the previous estimates I saw regarding this problem.”

Mozilla employed, self-confessed ‘old school nerd’ Svelto says that an initial 10% estimate was revised up because “If I subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as out-of-memory crashes) this number goes up to around 15%.” Moreover, it was determined that one in two bit flip crashes was due to a “genuine hardware issue.” Svelto notes this could be undershooting the real figure as Mozilla’s memory test on crash feature “only checks up to 1 GiB of memory and runs for no longer than 3 seconds.”

Thus, it is hard to drill down to probably the most fascinating statistic of how many Firefox crashes are precipitated by an errant cosmic ray passing though…

As a parting shot, Svelto doesn’t want fancy Arm-based MacBook owners, or any other niche device owner, thinking this is just about PCs with shaky RAM. Every device with memory can be affected by bit flips, asserts the engineer. That doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac, smartphone, or even a printer or router. From that perspective, PC desktop DIYers are probably in a better position, as they can replace any faulty component without throwing away the whole caboodle. But please, great cosmic ray caster in the sky, please don’t make me think I have RAM issues in 2026…

Apple quietly removed the 512GB RAM upgrade option from the Mac Studio this week, capping the M3 Ultra configuration at 256GB, MacRumors reported on Thursday. At the same time, Apple raised the price of the 96GB-to-256GB upgrade from $1,600 to $2,000, and delivery estimates for 256GB configurations have slipped to May.

The Mac Studio starts at 36GB RAM, with upgrade tiers ranging from 48GB up to — until this week — 512GB. The 512GB option, which was exclusive to the M3 Ultra chip and previously cost $4,000, no longer appears on Apple's configuration page. Apple has not commented publicly on the change, but the company’s rationale will inevitably link back to the ongoing memory shortage, which has sent commodity prices to record highs and constrained supply across the industry.

TrendForce revised its Q1 2026 DRAM contract price forecast in February to a 90-95% quarter-over-quarter increase, up from an earlier estimate of 55-60%. Meanwhile, combined DRAM and SSD prices will surge 130% this year, according to a recent forecast published by Gartner, which will drive global PC shipments down 10.4%.

All this is happening because memory manufacturers have reallocated production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory, the specialized memory stacked inside AI accelerators from Nvidia and others. HBM consumes roughly three times the wafer capacity of conventional DDR5, so every wafer diverted to AI accelerators removes three bits' worth of standard DRAM from the market. TrendForce does not expect meaningful relief before 2027 or 2028, when new fab capacity comes online.

Apple has generally fared better than most OEMs struggling with the memory shortage. The company is understood to have secured long-term DRAM supply agreements extending through Q1 2026, giving it more allocation certainty than Android manufacturers or PC vendors working on shorter procurement cycles, but CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged that the shortage will have a greater impact on Apple’s Q2 earnings.

The fact that the 512GB tier has disappeared regardless of this suggests that ultra-high-density memory is facing particular scarcity even for major buyers like Apple. MacRumors also noted that demand for high-memory Mac Studio configurations has increased as users look for machines capable of running large language models locally, which could be a contributing factor to the extended May shipping estimates on 256GB builds.

The timing of this also compounds an already awkward situation for Mac Studio buyers. The current lineup pairs the M4 Max with the older M3 Ultra, a cross-generation mismatch that came about because Apple skipped the M4 Ultra entirely, as the M4 Max lacks the UltraFusion connector needed to fuse two dies. Anyone configuring the top-end M3 Ultra model right now is paying a $4,000 premium for a chip Apple has already moved past.

Apple is also expected to release M5 Max and M5 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio later in 2026, though no release window has been confirmed. Whether the 512GB tier returns with that update will depend on whether DRAM supply conditions improve enough to make high-density memory available at scale, but that’s not looking likely.

Memory spot prices rose broadly in February 2026, with NAND flash wafer costs leading the way, according to DigiTimes market data compiled this month. Amidst the report of specific increases, the article warns that the increasing gap between demand and supply of memory is driving "rapid" spot price increases and procurement capital pressures, which, if continued, could lead to an "industry cycle collapse."

DDR5 16G (2Gx8) chips averaged $39, up 7.4% month-over-month, while 1Tb TLC flash wafers jumped 25% to $25 — the steepest single-month gain reported. These increases came despite a Lunar New Year slowdown that briefly cooled trading activity in mid-February, with spot markets rebounding once the holiday passed.

DDR4 posted more mixed results, with the 16Gb (2Gx8) variant holding nearly flat, rising just 0.26% to $78.10, while the 8Gb (1Gx8) gained 6.8% to $33. DDR3 4Gb (512Mx8) chips rose 7.5% to $5.70. The slower DDR4 gains reflect a moderation from the 20-30% monthly increases seen across DRAM products in January, though market DigiTimes says this pullback is “partly seasonal rather than a sign of easing structural pressure.”

The February spot data comes against a backdrop of sharply higher contract price forecasts, with TrendForce revising its Q1 2026 conventional DRAM contract price outlook upward in early February, raising its estimate from a prior 55-60% quarter-over-quarter increase to 90-95%. PC DRAM is now projected to more than double quarter-over-quarter, which TrendForce described as a new quarterly record. Meanwhile, NAND flash contract prices are forecast to rise 55-60% QoQ, also revised up from an earlier 33-38% estimate.

We’re all aware at this point that it’s AI infrastructure that’s driving these increases, having continued to pull memory capacity toward server DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, leaving conventional DRAM and consumer NAND segments undersupplied. North American cloud service providers have been pulling forward orders since late 2025, locking in allocations and pushing other buyers down the priority queue. TrendForce noted that even tier-1 PC OEMs with secured supplier allocations have seen inventory levels decline.

On the NAND side, the February spot jump extends a troubling, longer-term trend. According to DigiTimes, which cited ChinaFlashMarket data, 1Tb QLC/TLC flash wafer prices have roughly tripled since October 2025, with 512Gb TLC prices up nearly fivefold over the same period. This is because suppliers have been redirecting capacity toward enterprise SSDs, where margins are higher, limiting wafer availability for module makers and sustaining upward pressure across the category.

Memory prices have begun shifting on an hourly basis as the AI-driven shortage intensifies, according to a DigiTimes report published today, with semiconductor industry insiders warning that smaller firms unable to place immediate orders with upfront payment risk sharply higher quotes within minutes. The report describes a market now split between roughly 100 top-tier buyers with the leverage to secure supply and more than 190,000 small and mid-size enterprises fighting over what remains.

The report says that cloud service providers, leading automakers, and smartphone giants Apple and Samsung hold enough financial clout to resist price hikes and maintain priority allocation from memory manufacturers. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron cannot afford to jeopardize those relationships, so these large customers get served first, while also increasingly requiring prepayment or cash transactions before confirming orders — terms that smaller firms with little bargaining power will struggle with.

According to DigiTimes, these companies began struggling to absorb soaring memory costs in the second half of 2025. As prices continued climbing into 2026, some have started revising demand forecasts downward in what amounts to a "cut losses to survive" strategy. That approach is expected to spread as high prices persist, directly reducing overall market demand for memory.

Last month, TrendForce revised its Q1 2026 DRAM contract price forecast upward to a 90-95% quarter-over-quarter increase, with NAND flash up 55-60% over the same period. A separate DigiTimes report published today indicates that DRAM prices could surge a further 70% in Q2 2026, while research firm IDC has warned the shortage could persist well into 2027.

HP disclosed last month that DRAM now accounts for 35% of its PC build cost, up from between 15% and 18% a quarter earlier. Meanwhile, Gartner projects PC shipments will drop more than 10% in 2026, and smartphone shipments will fall roughly 8%, both driven by memory costs. IDC expects white-box and lower-tier vendors, including DIY system builders, to bear the heaviest burden.

All this raises a question about what happens next if enough SMEs exit the market because they can’t afford the premiums. If smaller buyers collectively pull back, tight capacity could soon become oversupply, potentially exposing the shortage as “illusory,” says DigiTimes.

Gartner on February 26 projected global PC shipments will fall 10.4% and smartphone shipments 8.4% in 2026 compared to 2025 levels, driven by what the firm estimates will be a 130% surge in combined DRAM and SSD prices by the end of the year.

The forecast puts 2026 on track for the steepest device shipment contraction in over a decade, according to Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner. The report landed one day after HP disclosed on its Q1 2026 earnings call that memory now accounts for 35% of its PC bill of materials, up from 15-18% last quarter, confirming in real financial terms what the rest of the industry has been warning about since late 2025.

This will lead to price increases of 17% among PCs year-over-year, leading to PC lifetimes extending by 15% for business users and 20% for consumers by the end of 2026, with the entry-level market facing the worst of it. Memory is on track to account for 23% of a PC's total bill of materials in 2026, up from 16% in 2025, a shift that Gartner says eliminates vendors' ability to absorb costs on low-margin products.

"This sharp increase removes vendors' ability to absorb costs, making low-margin entry-level laptops nonviable," Atwal said. "Ultimately, we expect the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028."

No hyperbole here

RAM price tracking paints a picture consistent with Gartner's projections, with a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that cost between $100 and $200 in October 2025 now starting at roughly $350. Some kits have climbed even higher: a Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5-6000 kit stabilized at $339 between November and January before jumping to $439 in early January, where it stayed through the end of the month. A Patriot Viper Elite 5 16GB DDR5-6000 kit went from $43.99 in October 2025 to $169.99 by early December.

By late January, some modules had stabilized at their inflated values, with DDR4-3200, DDR4-3600, DDR5-4800, and DDR5-5200 kits leveling off. Higher-end DDR5-5600 and DDR5-6000 kits were still climbing, though at a slower pace. More recent data from late February shows modest corrections in European DDR5 pricing, with some 32GB DDR5-6000/6400 kits in Germany falling from early-February peaks. But those declines have been modest, and no major source forecasts a return to pre-crisis pricing any time soon. For perspective, DDR5-6000 kits in the EU that averaged around €95-€100 through early autumn 2025 were still hovering around €425-€470 by in recent weeks.

NAND flash has been hit just as hard, with Phison's CEO warning that eMMC NAND common in phones and low-end devices had climbed from $1.50 to $20 per 8GB module last year, a 13-times increase, and said at least one foundry now demands three years' cash upfront for NAND supply. Kingston confirmed it saw a 246% increase in NAND wafer prices and publicly told consumers not to wait for lower prices.

OEM price rises across the board

HP CEO Karen Parkhill said during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call on February 25 that memory costs increased roughly 100% sequentially from Q1 to Q2, with expectations for further increases throughout the fiscal year. Despite those headwinds, HP's Personal Systems division posted an 11% year-over-year revenue increase to $10.3 billion on the back of Windows 11 upgrade cycles, but Parkhill said the company now expects a sharp double-digit decline in system shipments over the rest of the year as price increases take hold.

HP is already adapting by pushing lower-memory configurations and onboarding new suppliers, including reportedly exploring cheaper Chinese memory sources. Ketan Patel, HP's president of personal systems, said the company wants to "leverage part of our broad portfolio with silicon diversity" to offer different configurations and introduce low-memory options.

HP isn’t alone; Lenovo warned partners in late February to lock in orders by February 28 to avoid post-March price hikes on DRAM and NAND, while Dell told partners in December to expect price increases of up to 30%. Acer and Asus have also both confirmed they will pass higher memory costs through to consumers. TrendForce projects Q1 2026 will bring a record 90%-95% quarter-over-quarter jump in PC DRAM contract prices.

The knock-on effects of all this will extend (and already are extending) well beyond traditional PCs. Valve confirmed the Steam Deck is sold out globally due to memory and storage shortages, while Framework has raised DDR5 RAM upgrade prices by 50% for its DIY laptop edition in December and warned prices would likely rise again. Motherboard sales in some markets have dropped as much as 50% as builders balk at the cost of memory.

A more bearish outlook

IDC published its own updated forecast on February 26, and its numbers are now worse than Gartner's across the board. IDC projects the worldwide PC market will decline 11.3% in 2026, exceeding Gartner's 10.4%. Its smartphone outlook is even worse, with IDC expecting a 12.9% decline, far steeper than Gartner's 8.4%. Both figures represent a dramatic downward revision from IDC's December 2025 scenarios, which ranged from -4.9% to -8.9% for PCs and -2.9% to -5.2% for smartphones.

Part of this worsening picture is a pull-forward effect caused by PC and smartphone vendors shipping aggressively in Q4 2025 and into Q1 2026, rushing to get products out before memory price increases took full effect. IDC expects volumes to fall off dramatically starting in Q2. PC revenues will still grow 1.6% in 2026 thanks to higher ASPs, but neither market is expected to rebound until 2028.

IDC, like Gartner, sees the most damage at the budget-end of the market. More than 360 million smartphones shipped below $150 last year, and IDC said rising memory costs are rendering that price band unsustainable. Ultra-low-end smartphones below $50 could cease to exist, potentially reversing smartphone penetration gains in emerging markets. IDC does not expect a return to 2025 pricing within its forecast horizon.

Could things improve?

Potentially. Some prices are now stabilizing, though at levels that remain two to three times higher than mid-2025, and European DDR5 pricing has shown modest corrections from early-February peaks. If new memory fab capacity comes online faster than expected, or if AI infrastructure spending plateaus — unlikely — the worst-case scenarios may not fully materialize.

But the structural driver of this crisis, the deliberate reallocation of memory manufacturing capacity from consumer DRAM and NAND toward AI-focused HBM and high-density server modules, doesn’t look to be going anywhere, anytime soon. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have all prioritized HBM production, with Micron even controversially shuttering its Crucial consumer business, while TrendForce bleakly estimates that data centers will consume 70% of all memory chips manufactured in 2026.

Gartner advised vendors to accept unit volume declines rather than erode margins chasing price-sensitive buyers, and flagged the first half of 2026 as a critical window for optimizing pricing before component inflation compresses profitability further in Q2 and beyond. For consumers and builders, the calculus is straightforward: the era of cheap memory that defined the last several years of PC building is over, and nothing in the current data suggests it will return soon.

A 130% surge in combined DRAM and SSD prices by the end of 2026 will push PC prices up 17% compared to 2025 levels and wipe out the sub-$500 PC market entirely by 2028, according to a forecast published by research firm Gartner on February 26. The price shock will drive global PC shipments down 10.4% this year versus 2025, the steepest annual contraction in over a decade, as consumers and businesses hold onto existing hardware rather than upgrade.

The root cause is component inflation, with Gartner projecting that memory costs will climb from 16% to 23% of a PC's total bill of materials this year, a shift large enough to eliminate vendors' ability to absorb costs on low-margin products. Entry-level laptops under $500 become financially unviable at that ratio, and Gartner expects that price tier to be gone from the market within two years.

"This sharp increase removes vendors' ability to absorb costs, making low-margin entry-level laptops nonviable. Ultimately, we expect the sub-$500 entry-level PC segment will disappear by 2028," said Ranjit Atwal, senior director analyst at Gartner.

Gartner previously projected AI PCs would reach 50% market penetration before the end of the decade, but rising memory prices on premium-tier hardware will also push that milestone back to 2028. AI PCs, of course, require more onboard memory to run local inference workloads, making them especially exposed to DRAM cost increases.

Longer upgrade cycles will follow directly from higher prices, and Gartner says that PC lifetimes will extend by 15% for business buyers and 20% for consumers by the end of 2026, a trend it noted will raise concerns about security vulnerabilities on aging hardware.

For the PC market, demand will increasingly concentrate at the top end, where vendors carry enough margin to absorb component inflation without destroying profitability. Gartner advised vendors to accept unit volume decline rather than cut prices to chase budget buyers. "Overall, device vendors and channels face a critical window in the first half of 2026 to optimize pricing and protect margins before component inflation compresses profitability from the second quarter onwards," Atwal said.

The forecast covers smartphones as well, where shipments are projected to fall 8.4% this year. Gartner estimated basic smartphone buyers will exit the market five times faster than premium buyers in 2026 as rising costs push consumers toward refurbished or second-hand alternatives.

55 years ago, in a courthouse serving the San Jose-Milpitas district of Santa Clara County, a judge for the first time signed a search warrant that treated a computer system as something that could be searched, and its content seized. Dated February 19, 1971, the order authorized Oakland Police to enter offices in Palo Alto and homes in Menlo Park to look not just for papers but also for data stored on machines.

The case involved University Computing Company and a program described in court documents as a remote-plotting system (a trade secret) valued at $15,000, or around $120,000 today. In his affidavit, Sgt. Terence Green requested authority to seize “computer memory bank or other data storage devices,” along with “computer printout sheets,” language that shows how investigators might have been struggling to grapple with the concept of intangible forms of property at a time when most computing infrastructure would fill entire rooms.

Central to the dispute were punch cards, the dominant medium for program storage and job submission at the time. The affidavit describes “a deck of key punch cards” tied to the remote plotting program. Each card represented a line of code or data, meaning a full program could be made up of hundreds or thousands of cards that had to be meticulously kept in order.

By the late 1960s, IBM’s 80-column punched card format had effectively become the industry standard, meaning systems from multiple vendors were built around reading and writing this layout. This also meant that a stolen program could be as tangible as a misplaced deck of cards. At the same time, once those cards were written to storage, the program no longer existed solely on punch cards, which explains why investigators sought authority to seize both the physical cards and the “computer memory bank or other data storage devices” that might contain the same code in electronic form.

The warrant itself would later be reproduced in Jay Becker’s The Investigation of Computer Crime, published as part of the National Center on White-Collar Crime’s operational guide. A copy of an “actual state search warrant” appears in Appendix 5 of the report. Becker.

Early digital forensics

Becker’s manual offers a glimpse into how investigators in the early 1970s were already wrestling with now-routine problems in digital forensics. In the section titled “The Nature of Computerized Evidence,” he notes that evidence in a computer is “more ‘dense’ than in any other information system,” describing how what appears to be a single computer tape can contain as much information as “a shelf full of books.” Much of that information, he explains, is invisible without translating the machine-readable symbolism into print.

According to the reproduced documentation, investigators conducting the February 1971 search didn’t simply remove hardware, but generated printed directories of files stored on the system and produced magnetic tapes to preserve the contents. Becker emphasizes that in some cases it may be “desirable, if not necessary, to duplicate the controls” of each information-storing device, whether tape, disk, or card, so that subsequent changes cannot compromise the evidentiary record.

Becker goes on to warn that search warrants in cases involving computers must be narrowly defined because the system may contain “an enormous amount of description for the investigator to cover each component of the computer system which he seeks to inspect or seize.” That concern about overbreadth and technical unfamiliarity would later be a foundational concept to jurisprudence concerning digital search and seizure.

More than half a century later, storage media and network architectures might have changed beyond recognition, but the underlying problem identified by Becker has not. Meanwhile, crime taking place in and evidenced by the digital domain often dominates the newswires.

A charming video from a Turkish wedding reveals a delighted bride and groom being showered with opulent gifts, as per tradition. However, this happy couple isn’t seen being weighed down in gold and jewelry, as if typically the case, instead they are collecting the ultimate riches of the PC tech world – GPUs, RAM, and processors.

The video clip embedded below (expand the tweet to see it) begins with the groom being presented with an MSI Suprim GeForce RTX 5090 in white. The multi-thousand-dollar GPU is hung around the groom's neck using red ribbons. Next up, the same wedding guest presents the bride with a quad-channel DDR5 memory kit, again lashed together using red ribbons. If the guy who presented these tech delights wasn’t the ‘best man’, he is now.

Another wedding guest steps to the fore and adds an Intel Core Ultra Unlocked processor to the groom’s gifts. The subtitles read “right now it’s a full computer set” (machine translation). So, we guess bulky items like the case, motherboard, and PSU weren’t suitable for hanging upon the newlyweds.

Something old
Something GPU
Something borrowed
And something from team Blue

My step-sister married into a Turkish family. It was probably nearly 20 years ago, but I don’t remember her getting any computer tech gifts. The wedding did involve a lot of gold and AK47s, though.

We’ve recently reported on the value of both DRAM and NAND ICs rising above gold, by weight. Such reports may have inspired the Turkish wedding guests in their lovely video clip.

However, we note that while gold never tarnishes, diamonds are forever, cash is king, and happiness is a warm AK47 - an RTX 5090 is probably only going to be serviceable for about a decade, if it doesn’t self-combust in the interim. Meanwhile, a large number of economists and tech watchers expect there to be a sharp correction in the AI-stoked RAM and NAND markets, in due course.

We don’t want to be Debbie Downers about this wedding, though, and wish the bride and groom a long, blissful, and lag-free marriage.

Some Apple customers have recently been taken by surprise due to the order lead times on several Mac models with upgraded Unified Memory quotas, which could be largely driven by the immense popularity of OpenClaw, the locally-run open-source AI agent that’s taking the internet by storm and sending users scrambling for Macs to run the AI.

While you can still get base model units of the MacBook Air, iMac, M4 Mac mini, and other basic models on the same day, upgrading memory can now increase delivery wait times by up to three weeks.

However, going for the highest possible memory capacity on high-end models greatly increases your waiting time, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of Unified Memory taking up to five to six weeks to be delivered.

Alex Finn, founder and CEO of Creator Buddy, linked this shortage in his X post to demand driven by “the world’s first true AI agent" in reference to OpenClaw (previously Clawdbot/Moltbot).

While data centers are hungry for AI GPUs and some startups are using multi-gaming GPU setups to train AI models, they’re not ideal for personal agentic AI run locally. This is especially true if you use a huge 70-billion parameter model in FP16 for your agent, which would require around 140GB of memory just for weights, according to AI investor Ben Pouladian. That means that it wouldn’t fit inside a single RTX 5090 with 32GB of VRAM, and even if you manage to connect five graphics cards for a total of 160GB of memory, you’re still bound by the PCIe bottleneck.

Apple’s Unified Memory architecture fixes that problem. Even though HBM is still way faster than the LPDDR used in Macs and MacBooks, the fact that all the processing units — CPU, GPU, and NPU — share the same memory means that they don’t have to deal with PCIe bottlenecks or require technologies similar to NVLink, which is typically only found on data center class graphics cards.

Because of this, more and more people who want to run their own local AI agent are purchasing high-memory Mac models. This isn’t limited to M3 Ultra Mac Studio units with 512GB of memory. Even Mac minis and MacBook Pros with upgraded memory now have a waiting time of two to three weeks.

We cannot definitively say that these delays are caused entirely by huge numbers of people buying these devices to run their own AI models, as Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that it’s chasing memory supply to meet high customer demand. However, additional pressure from the consumer side will definitely not help with the memory chip shortage that, as of the moment, is primarily driven by AI hyperscalers and institutional buyers.

It's long been said that the insane rise in DRAM pricing would eventually affect common household electronics, and those predictions are starting to come true, likely sooner than most people imagine or would like to admit. The latest casualty is the market for ISP-provided broadband routers, set-top boxes (STBs), and gateways, which could see prices for the memory they require rise sevenfold.

Counterpoint researchers state that this steep climb should last at least through June, and is likely to continue due to the ongoing supply crisis. Whereas memory used to account for about 3% of the average bill of materials (BOM) for producing one of these pieces of equipment, that percentage has now ballooned to 20%, and it will have an outsized influence on the equipment's final price.

While this likely won't have a direct impact on the monthly price of your internet connection, the usual "free installation" and similar deals, such as a free set-top box, may disappear over time. The graph below shows a significant difference in LPDDR4 pricing for mobile phones versus the standard DDR4 used in consumer-facing telco gear.

According to Counterpoint, routers could be affected the most, as the OEMs of these devices don't tend to have the kind of negotiation power and long-term supply contracts as the bigger industry players. DDR4 was already being phased out before the crisis hit, and supply constraints forced a surge in prices. The fact that the AI craze led to the addition of memory-hogging features in routers and STBs didn't help matters, as some equipment has as much RAM as a common PC.

The market researchers also note that this problem may even affect ISP fiber rollouts. It's not hard to imagine that the combined price of the equipment becomes a significant factor, especially when the time comes to pass the costs on to consumers, who may balk at paying for equipment that was often "free" for many years.

Even big telecom and phone gear manufacturers have started specifically calling out the problem in their quarterly earnings statements. In the statement for its Q4 2025 results, Nokia's CEO said that although "at a macro level across the company, [RAM pricing] is not a huge part", the firm intends to "secure the supply based on the commitments [it does have]" and that "[it expects ] to be passed through to pricing".

Meanwhile, MediaTek reportedly stated that it's got enough memory for its datacenter needs, but that for other segments it will "adjust its pricing to reflect the rising supply chain costs and allocate our supply across products based on the overall profitability". Likewise, Qualcomm's CEO said that, with data centers as priority #1, "industry-wide memory shortage and price increases are likely to define the overall scale of the handset industry through the fiscal year."

Framework just released its monthly update on the memory and storage pricing situation, and the news isn’t good. According to the company blog, DDR5 memory pricing now ranges from $12 to $16 per GB. It also said that it’s selling its memory kits “for as close as we can to the weighted average cost of our purchases from suppliers.” This means that some RAM sticks will be more affordable than what’s available on the market, while others would be a bit more expensive. For cases like this, the niche laptop manufacturer said that Framework Laptop DIY Edition buyers should pick them up instead from other retailers.

The memory and storage chip shortage started to go into full swing in the last quarter of 2025, and Framework released its first update about the situation in late November. The company said that it will no longer sell standalone RAM in an effort to prevent scalpers from hoarding these chips, and that it will also increase its pricing in response to market conditions. About a couple of weeks later, it made another post telling the public that it will be forced to increase memory prices. It also promised it wouldn’t gouge its customers despite the crisis, while also criticizing Dell and Apple for their egregious RAM prices.

Unfortunately, it only took two weeks for Framework to announce another memory price hike out of necessity. The company encouraged buyers to bring their own RAM this time and even added a link to PCPartPicker to help customers find a better deal on it. By mid-January, the pressure finally affected the company’s desktops, with the Framework Desktop’s price going up by at least $40 due to increased LPDDR5x costs.

This latest announcement shows that price increases are expected to continue, with the company saying that it’s anticipating this to happen repeatedly over the next few months. While Framework said that it’s trying to fix problems across the PC industry, it has its hands tied when it comes to memory and storage. The only thing that it can offer at the moment is “provide transparency around what is actually occurring.” While this won’t do the wallets of PC builders and enthusiasts any good, it would at least show them a clear explanation and monthly updates as to what is happening in the overall market.

Memory pricing cycles are nothing new, but the way it’s being sold is changing. Over the past several months, Samsung and SK hynix have begun moving away from long-term, fixed-price supply contracts, replacing them with shorter agreements and post-settlement pricing mechanisms that allow prices to be adjusted after delivery. Micron is also understood to be following a similar path.

According to reporting cited by DigiTimes, these newer contracts are appearing at the same time as the sharp upswing in DRAM and NAND pricing we’ve been watching unfold with relentless escalation, driven primarily by AI infrastructure demand and constrained supply at advanced nodes. Memory makers are expected to make over $551 billion in revenue in 2026.

Where buyers once locked in prices for six to 12 months at a time with limited scope for renegotiation, suppliers are now favoring contracts measured in quarters or even months, with pricing that’s particularly exposed to market movements, which shifts the risk back onto buyers.

Post-settlement pricing reflects supplier confidence

Under traditional agreements, DRAM and NAND prices are set at the time of signing. Even if spot prices move sharply, quarter renegotiation typically adjusts pricing within a narrow band of roughly 10%. These arrangements gave the market’s largest buyers cost predictability and insulated them from short-term instability.

Post-settlement pricing does the opposite. While products are delivered at the agreed price during the contract term, the final payment is adjusted at the end of the term to reflect prevailing market prices. If prices rise materially — as with DRAM in recent months — customers pay the difference. On the other hand, suppliers absorb the loss if prices fall.

Now, according to industry sources cited by Digitimes, Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have all signed such contracts, primarily with large North American technology companies. One source noted that, for major customers, securing memory supply has become a higher priority than locking in price certainty, even if that means paying more later. This is nothing more than fundamental supply and demand dynamics that were bound to come into play given the state of the market in recent months.

It’s important to note that these post-settlement pricing arrangements only work if suppliers are confident that prices will remain elevated, because why would they push for them otherwise? The willingness of all the big three memory makers to adopt post-settlement pricing, unfortunately, suggests they are.

Contract lengths shrink alongside price flexibility

Pricing is not all that's changing — contract durations are also getting shorter. Memory buyers, particularly hyperscalers, are understood to have pushed for longer-term agreements to guarantee supply as demand for high-capacity memory accelerates while supply tightens. Suppliers are obviously starting to push back against those terms, opting instead for contracts lasting mere months. DigiTimes, citing Korean-language publication ET News, gave the example of a North American data center operator failing to secure a two-year supply deal from one memory vendor, subsequently sourcing capacity from another supplier under a shorter contract that included post-settlement pricing.

These supplier-favoring terms are expected to persist at least through the second half of the year, when the pace of memory price increases is projected by some analysts to plateau somewhat. Even then, few expect a return to the long, fixed-price contracts that dominated during the initial post-pandemic years, and who's to say that pricing will start to slow down in any case?

The current state of the memory market is without precedent, strangled tighter and tighter with each passing day by the unrelenting demands of an out-of-control AI bubble. While we have seen some levelling off in recent weeks, it’s borderline impossible to make any meaningful predictions in good faith about where memory pricing may or may not be even next month; we can forget about where it might be six months or more from now because there’s simply no telling.

Operating margins now at 40-50%

Recent analysis from ZDNet shows just how favorable this market has become for suppliers. It projects that Samsung and SK hynix could post NAND operating margins of 40-50% for the first half of 2026, levels that would have seemed implausible during the oversupply conditions we saw in 2022 and early 2023. Those margins are predicated not just on higher prices, but disciplined supply management and a willingness to walk away from unfavorable contracts.

ZDNet notes that the industry expects that NAND products will reach record profitability for the first time since 2017, adding that its margins are estimated to have climbed into the 20% range in Q4 2025. NAND prices are expected to rise in stages across Q1 and Q2 of this year, with conservative capital spending continuing to tighten supply and contribute to what is becoming a chronic shortage.

Not all buyers are feeling the effects of this equally, though. Apple is one company that, according to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, has shifted its memory price negotiations from a six-monthly to quarterly cadence. He expects LPDDR prices to rise in Apple’s first fiscal quarter of 2026, with further increases likely in the following quarter. NAND price increases are expected to be more modest.

Kuo also notes that many smartphone brands are struggling to secure sufficient memory supply even when they’re willing to pay higher prices. Some Chinese vendors have reportedly delayed product launches or reduced hardware specifications as a result. But Apple’s position is different: While higher memory costs could pressure gross margins in the near term, Kuo suggests the iPhone maker is willing to absorb those costs to protect shipment volumes, adding that Apple is considering keeping its starting prices for its planned iPhone 18 lineup largely unchanged.

All these factors together demonstrate that there’s a structural shift taking place in how memory is allocated and sold. The balance of power has moved firmly back toward suppliers, and that’s causing contract terms to adjust accordingly.

This doesn’t mean that prices will rise indefinitely. Memory remains a cyclical, capital-intensive industry, and periods of high profitability tend to attract overinvestment. But the current contract changes suggest that suppliers are prioritizing margin discipline and pricing flexibility over volume stability, and will continue to do so in at least the medium term.