{"id":547693,"date":"2026-03-19T22:41:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T22:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/547693\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T22:41:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T22:41:13","slug":"think-the-ram-crisis-is-bad-now-it-just-keeps-getting-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/547693\/","title":{"rendered":"Think the RAM Crisis Is Bad Now? It Just Keeps Getting Worse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unless the AI bubble bursts<\/a> and sends all those planned data center projects packing, you won\u2019t see an end to memory pricing woes anytime soon. One of the big three semiconductor companies capable of making memory doesn\u2019t imagine it will be able to meet all consumer demand for at least another four years.<\/p>\n

The DRAM and NAND memory market is dominated by three major players, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. The latter falls under the global conglomerate SK Group. The South Korean-based RAM maker\u2019s chairman, Chey Tae-won, told Bloomberg<\/a> that the company is expanding memory-making capacity. Unfortunately, it won\u2019t be able to meet demand until \u201caround\u201d 2030.<\/p>\n

Chey spoke to reporters outside of GTC 2026<\/a> earlier this week. He said that capacity for the basic wafers the company uses for its chips is lagging 20% behind demand. All this inevitably trickles down to consumers. We\u2019ve seen prices increase for practically every gadget, from laptops<\/a> to smartphones like the recent Samsung Galaxy S26<\/a>, all the way down to enthusiast-level miniature computing chips like the Raspberry Pi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The blame for the memory shortage falls at the feet of the AI boom. The largest AI datacenter projects, like OpenAI\u2019s multi-state Stargate project<\/a>, have such a massive demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Semiconductor companies are making such a profit from these high-end memory chips that they have reduced capacity for consumer-level DRAM and SSD storage. Even major companies like Valve are struggling to source affordable RAM for its Steam Machine.<\/a> One of the company\u2019s staff reportedly joked<\/a> to industry insiders at GDC 2026, \u201cIf you have a line on a bunch of RAM, we are in the market and would like to buy it.\u201d<\/p>\n

RAM makers aren\u2019t keen on increasing supply \"SkSK Hynix is building up memory capacity with a $13 billion new factory. It just won\u2019t be online until late 2027 at the earliest. \u00a9 Jung Yeon-je \/ AFP <\/p>\n

The reason why the major semiconductor companies are moving slowly to increase supply is\u2014ironically\u2014a fear of having too much RAM. Korean outlet Chosun Biz reported<\/a>, based on anonymous industry sources, that Samsung hopes the global semiconductor market may reverse course in 2028. It reportedly doesn\u2019t want to scale capacity so much because of \u201cuncertainties in demand forecasting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Essentially, Samsung may be concerned about scaling up too fast and then the RAM supply being too much once AI data center demand for high-bandwidth memory falters. Currently, 50% of SK Hynix and Samsung memory output is in the form of HBM slated for AI data centers.<\/p>\n

SK Hynix is expanding capacity, according to Chosun Biz. It\u2019s building more centers located around Korea such as Icheon, Cheongju, and Yongin. It\u2019s spending close to $13 billion on a massive new assembly plant made solely to supply HBM. The work is set to start in April and not be finished until the end of 2027, according to Reuters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"JensenNvidia CEO Jensen Huang holding up an example of the large Vera Rubin chips slated to go inside. large-scale data centers. \u00a9 Bridget Bennett\/Bloomberg via Getty Images <\/p>\n

A single Nvidia Vera Rubin chip\u2014the company\u2019s latest, most powerful AI training SoC (system on a chip)\u2014requires as much as 288GB of HBM. That\u2019s nine times as much as your typical gaming-ready PC. The older Grace Blackwell-based B300 chips require just slightly less memory. And this AI boom is how Nvidia plans to drive $1 trillion in revenue.<\/a><\/p>\n

Data centers plan to stack hundreds of these chips together, just for the sake of AI cloud compute. Until demand for AI data centers bottoms out, we\u2019ll be in for years of inflated gadget prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unless the AI bubble bursts and sends all those planned data center projects packing, you won\u2019t see an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48,139274,848,1124],"class_list":{"0":"post-547693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-pcs","12":"tag-samsung","13":"tag-smartphones"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}