Lenovo says the 'RAMageddon' is the new normal, outlines survival guide — at ISC 2026 an exec said 'it will never be like it was last year'

Hardware enthusiasts, server administrators, and all regular readers of this site will be well aware of the ongoing "RAMpocalypse," the memory and storage shortage affecting nearly every market and raising prices across the board in the tech sector. If you were hoping for relief, don't hold your breath; at the International Supercomputing Conference this past week, Lenovo reportedly said "it will never be like it was last year." Underlining the point, one of Lenovo's presentation slides was titled "The 5 Step RAMaggeddon Survival Guide."

That comes to us by way of our German friends over at ComputerBase, who note that "never" was said with a smirk, thus implying that it wasn't meant to be taken literally. Instead, the message from Lenovo is that memory prices were unusually low in early 2025, and it will be a long time before we see comparatively low prices on RAM, flash memory, and other components, as the #1 worldwide PC OEM expects AI demand to continue growing.

According to ComputerBase's report from ISC 2026, Lenovo's broader message is that the economics of the memory industry have fundamentally changed. The company reportedly argued that even as significant new manufacturing capacity comes online beginning around 2028, demand from AI infrastructure is expected to absorb much of that additional output, preventing DRAM and NAND prices from returning to the lows seen over the past two years.

The report points to SK hynix's recently announced plans to triple its memory production capacity by 2034 as supporting evidence. Lenovo's reasoning is straightforward: the notoriously profit-hungry memory manufacturers would be unlikely to invest so heavily in expanding production if they expected a return to the razor-thin margins and oversupply that characterized parts of the market in early 2025.

In case you needed extra evidence for its argument, Lenovo also suggested that memory capacity itself is becoming an increasingly important consideration when designing and purchasing servers. While vendors have traditionally advertised the maximum supported memory capacity of new platforms, actually populating those DIMM slots has become far more expensive. New dual-socket servers are on the way next year with 16 memory channels per processor, meaning that even a relatively modest configuration can require around 1 TB of installed memory to fully utilize the available bandwidth.

Lenovo is far from the only company predicting a prolonged memory crunch, although the industry's incentives are worth keeping in mind. Micron recently told investors it expects supply to remain constrained through at least 2027, with only gradual improvement beginning in 2028, while SK hynix has warned the shortage could persist until around 2030 as AI infrastructure continues absorbing wafer capacity. Those forecasts are backed by multi-year supply agreements worth roughly $100 billion that Micron has already signed with customers, underscoring how seriously hyperscalers are treating long-term memory availability.

Even companies that traditionally wield enormous purchasing power are feeling the squeeze. Apple reportedly has sought permission from the U.S. government to source DRAM from Chinese memory maker CXMT, a Pentagon-blacklisted company, illustrating just how valuable additional memory supply has become as prices continue to climb. At the same time, memory vendors are enjoying some of the strongest pricing power (and profit margins) they've seen in years, giving them little incentive to accelerate a return to the boom-and-bust pricing cycles that once defined the DRAM market.

Ironically, one consequence of the ongoing memory shortage is that HBM is becoming more economically attractive relative to conventional system memory. DRAM manufacturers have redirected significant production capacity toward higher-margin HBM for AI accelerators, reducing the supply of commodity DDR5 and LPDDR5 while demand for both remains elevated. As a result, the premium for HBM-backed computing has narrowed, not because HBM has become inexpensive, but because traditional system memory has become dramatically more expensive. Hyperscalers were going to buy the GPUs anyway, so maximizing their utilization to reduce DDR5 requirements suddenly becomes an attractive proposition.

That shift helps explain Lenovo's suggestion that GPU-accelerated computing may now make more financial sense for some workloads. If an application can keep much of its working set in GPU-attached HBM, it may require significantly less DDR5 installed in the host system. With system DRAM now representing a much larger share of overall server cost than it did just a year ago, reducing memory capacity requirements can materially lower the price of deploying large-scale infrastructure.

Obviously, we don't know whether Lenovo's long-term outlook will prove accurate, but memory pricing has historically been cyclical, with periods of oversupply often followed by sharp corrections. With hyperscalers continuing to pour billions into AI infrastructure and memory vendors increasingly prioritizing high-margin enterprise products, the company believes the unusually inexpensive DRAM and NAND prices of 2024 and early 2025 may prove to have been an anomaly.

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