RAM to see ‘significant price increases’ before end of 2026 as memory crisis expected to last ‘at least’ another 3 years
- A source at a major Chinese chipmaker says the company “expects the global memory shortage to last at least another three years.”
- On top of that, analyst firm TrendForce suggests “significant price increases” for RAM will occur in the final quarter of 2026.
- U.S. cloud giants are meeting increased demand that’s driving up fourth-quarter prices.
A source at one of the big Chinese memory chip makers warned that the company anticipates the RAM shortage will last until the end of the decade, and we’ve also heard some gloomy near-term news from TrendForce.
TweakTown highlighted a post by Jukan about X (who works at analyst firm Citrini Research), which in turn pointed out a report from The Wire China.
This quotes a YMTC employee in China as saying that the company “expects the global memory shortage to last at least another three years.” YMTC just raised the price of its chips, the source says (to no one’s surprise), and is shifting its production toward higher-profit-margin chips.
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Jukan links this specifically to NAND production (for SSDs), but the quoted comment refers more broadly to the memory crisis (i.e. also RAM). However, as TweakTown points out, the alleged impact on SSDs is particularly relevant since YMTC is now the world’s third largest supplier of NAND chips, behind only Samsung and SK Hynix.
Other predictions, such as those from analyst firm TrendForce, predict that NAND supply will rebalance later in 2027, but that notion is hotly contested here.
Speaking of TrendForce, Jukan also highlighted a new report from the company that rates DRAM supply as “very tight,” noting that: “Initial supplier discussions on 4Q26 contract pricing point to significant price increases, suggesting strengthening demand momentum, particularly from US CSPs.”
In other words, large cloud service providers (CSPs) are the main force behind the surge in demand that is driving Q4 RAM prices to significant increases.
Analysis: Negative rumors continue to line up
“Significant” RAM price increases sound ominous, mainly because memory prices have already increased painfully in recent months. If you remember, in the German market, DDR5 memory is a ridiculous 544% more than the price it was before the RAM crisis started, so the idea of further increases seems, well, even more ridiculous. But here we are.
We can apparently expect SSDs to become more expensive as well, according to the YMTC leak, although it’s worth noting that the company is interested in talking about its future prospects and profits (as it heads toward an IPO). That said, this is not an official statement, but rather a leak (although it could have been leaked intentionally, cynics would no doubt argue).
The fact of the matter is that more memory-related misery is quite credible these days, as all predictions are heavily weighted towards more price increases through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. The view that we have at least another three years of this crisis to overcome, which will take us until 2030, is a view also shared by other analysts and industry figures, including the CEO of Nvidia (and those in the SSD world).
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