We might not be past the worst part of the global memory shortages, as the most severe supply chain squeeze could happen soon. During Team Group's earnings conference on November 2, the company stated that the worst period in memory demand is projected to be between Q4 2026 and Q2 2027, which is just a few months away. Major memory makers such as SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron have sold out their 2027 supply and entered into long-term agreements with customers, making it increasingly difficult to source memory for any third-party purposes. Team Group states that even if you have the funds, it might be impossible to purchase memory products. Currently, it is possible to buy memory, albeit at a high price, but soon enough, that may no longer be an option, noted the company.

Even though CXMT and YMTC are supplying close to 10% of the memory market share with their products, it is still impossible to satisfy demand. A supply-demand balance may not emerge until the second half of 2028 or even later. Currently, Team Group sells most of its memory modules to businesses in the B2B sector, which commands 64.6%, while the B2C sector, selling directly to consumers, accounts for 35.4%. This is a sharp reversal compared to the 2025 Q3 figures, where B2B was 24.6% and B2C was 75.4%. Most of the revenue now comes from the business sector developing AI servers, rather than traditional consumer purchases.

Two days after arguing that the DRAM in home PCs would be put to better use in data centers, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down with around 50 Samsung presidents on Saturday, October 31. The group went well past the chip business, with leaders from Samsung's finance and biotech arms joining the electronics side at the company's training center in Yongin. Samsung presented it as part of a leadership seminar series for its company-wide AI push, and the talks apparently covered where AI is headed, the markets it could open up, and how it changes the way large companies make decisions. According to Samsung, Altman told the room that adopting AI alone doesn't give anyone an edge, and that the payoff comes from using it to move faster and build better products.

Nothing came out of it in terms of a new supply contract, at least publicly, and Samsung's own write-up stuck to AI strategy. Still, it's hard to look at the visit separately from the memory shortage. Samsung signed a letter of intent with OpenAI back in October 2025 to act as a memory partner for Stargate, with OpenAI's demand projected at up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month. Separately, on October 31, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won also reportedly met Altman in Seoul, with SK hynix and SK Telecom executives joining, according to industry sources. Last month, AMD's Lisa Su spent hours with Samsung's chip chief chasing HBM supply, and amid all these meetings, Micron's CEO expects the memory crunch to get worse in 2027 and 2028. It seems like every major buyer is knocking on the same Korean doors.

Micron is actively working on bringing its next-generation G11 NAND Flash technology to production, as the company has announced that G11 will be its first 3D NAND Flash. With the current G9 technology shipping across Micron's product portfolio, the company has created NAND Flash storage modules using over 200 layers of scaling. However, as the current technology reaches its limitations, the next phase involves exploring vertical stacking. With G11, Micron aims to use wafer-on-wafer 3D NAND stacking to double the capacity of NAND modules. Micron is now officially following in the footsteps of Chinese NAND giant YMTC, which has been making 3D stacked NAND for some time using Xtacking technology.

This is achieved by splitting each wafer into separate components. One is designed as a memory cell wafer, while the other contains peripheral logic circuits. These are combined using hybrid bonding technology in wafer-to-wafer stacking. Hybrid bonding creates a permanent bond between two silicon chips using embedded metal bumps that fuse together to form a single chip. Multiple dies or entire silicon wafers can be connected by stacking the back ends of two chips together. In this way, Micron plans to ship 400-layer NAND in the second half of 2027, which is less than a year away, and we are about to see more commercialization of 3D silicon.

YMTC, known as a NAND Flash manufacturer, is reportedly preparing to start mass production of LPDDR5X memory. While it has been known for some time that YMTC plans to enter DRAM production alongside its main NAND Flash business, it was not widely known that the company had already begun low-scale manufacturing. According to Counterpoint Research, YMTC has been producing about 5,000 wafers per month of 16 Gb LPDDR5X DRAM running at 7,500 MT/s at its Fab 2 since October 2025. The company is now preparing to begin volume production of LPDDR5X memory with speeds of 9,600 MT/s at its Fab 3, using Vertical Channel Transistor (VCT) 4F² cell structure technology.

YMTC has a significant advantage with 3D silicon, which represents the next phase of memory evolution. With its Xtacking 4.0 technology, YMTC can separate memory cell wafers from peripheral logic circuits and combine them using hybrid bonding wafer-to-wafer stacking. Hybrid bonding creates a permanent bond between two silicon chips using embedded metal bumps that are fused together to form a single chip. Multiple dies or entire silicon wafers can be connected by stacking the back ends of two chips together.

Micron has decided not to bring 4F² DRAM to market, even though it says it invented the cell design and has been researching it for around two decades. Scott DeBoer, Micron's President and Chief Technology and Products Officer, shared the decision during the company's technology webinar on October 21. On paper, 4F² uses vertical channel transistors to shrink each memory cell's footprint by about a third compared with the 6F² layout used in today's DRAM. However, DeBoer argued that real-world density is limited by how closely the capacitors can be packed, not by the cell's footprint, calling the density advantage over 6F² "a bit of a myth." He also said 4F² can be built, but at a higher cost and complexity, and that it runs into fundamental scaling problems at leading-edge nodes, which points toward 3D DRAM instead.

That puts Micron at odds with its rivals. Samsung and SK hynix are both developing 4F² designs, and China's CXMT says its first 4F² product will be a server DDR5 RDIMM due by the end of this year. Micron will keep scaling 6F² instead, with its 1-delta node set to ramp in Boise, Idaho, in the second half of 2027 and the 1-epsilon node after it moving to wafer bonding. 3D DRAM is being developed as a parallel path, but there's no timeline yet, and Micron says it will only switch once the economics make sense. It's a risky bet if rivals manage to make 4F² cheap at scale, especially with memory supply expected to get even tighter in 2027 and 2028, per Micron's own estimates.

Michael Dell doesn't think the memory shortage is anywhere near over. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, Dell's chairman and CEO said things will get worse next year, as the AI data center buildout keeps soaking up DRAM and HBM supply. According to him, the bottleneck for Dell isn't demand, since the company is sitting on roughly $95 billion worth of AI server orders it hasn't delivered yet, the largest backlog in its history. Memory is what's holding those shipments back, as AI accelerators need plenty of HBM, while the servers around them still rely on conventional DRAM.

Relief also looks quite far away. New memory fabs take around four years to build, so Dell apparently doesn't expect meaningful new supply until 2029 or 2030. That aligns with Micron's CEO, who recently said supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than it is this year. Interestingly, SK hynix's CEO said something similar, expecting the memory shortage to last through 2030. Dell is reportedly coping by buying DRAM only when final assembly is close and by locking in long-term supply agreements, though there's no word on how much of that applies to its consumer products.

Chinese NAND flash maker YMTC apparently expects the global memory shortage to last another three years. The claim comes from a profile of the company published by The Wire China, in which a YMTC employee, speaking anonymously, shared the outlook. The same employee said YMTC has raised prices for its chips and shifted capacity toward higher-margin products. The excerpt was shared on X by @jukan05, who read it as a NAND forecast, although the employee's wording covers memory in general. Three more years would put the end of the shortage somewhere around late 2029. This is one unnamed employee's words, of course, and not public guidance from YMTC.

That 2029 prediction is well past TrendForce's estimate, which has NAND flash supply loosening in the second half of 2027 as new capacity comes online. It sits closer to Micron's view, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying last week that supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028. The shift in capacity matters too, especially for regular PC builders. Counterpoint Research ranked YMTC fourth in NAND bit shipments in Q2 with a 14% share, yet only fifth in revenue, since its product mix leans toward consumer applications. Moving capacity to higher-margin chips could leave less for consumer SSDs, even as YMTC works to double its wafer output with new fabs. Nevertheless, readers planning a storage upgrade shouldn't count on prices dropping anytime soon.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says memory and storage supply will likely be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than it was in 2026. He made the remarks during Micron's fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on September 30, where the company reported record quarterly revenue of $54.2 billion. Here's what he said:

Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026. AI is becoming super intelligent, and memory enhances this intelligence and the competitiveness of our customers' platforms. Even with additional industry DRAM clean room space plans with robust demand trends, including new upside requests from customers, we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today announced results for its fourth quarter and full year of fiscal 2026, which ended September 3, 2026.

Fiscal Q4 2026 Highlights

• Revenue of $54.23 billion versus $41.46 billion for the prior quarter and $11.32 billion for the same period last year
• GAAP net income of $37.70 billion, or $32.87 per diluted share
• Non-GAAP net income of $38.40 billion, or $33.42 per diluted share
• Operating cash flow of $43.97 billion versus $25.39 billion for the prior quarter and $5.73 billion for the same period last year

Micron has reportedly discontinued its 2 GB GDDR7 memory chips, the same modules used on several GeForce RTX 50 series cards. Spotted by UNIKO's Hardware, Micron's 28 Gbps D8FHL chip (MT68A512M32DF-28:A) is now listed as end of life on the company's own website. Every 2 GB GDDR7 chip in Micron's catalog, both the 28 Gbps and 32 Gbps variants, now carries the same EOL status, leaving 3 GB modules as the only option going forward.

Micron only started supplying GDDR7 to NVIDIA in a meaningful way earlier this year, and its chips were never the primary source for RTX 50 cards. Samsung and SK Hynix still cover the bulk of the supply, so this shouldn't cause an immediate shortage. Still, losing even a partial supplier during an already tight memory market isn't reassuring, and it says something about where these companies would rather put their manufacturing capacity these days.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), today announced a major milestone in memory innovation with the successful demonstration of the world's first 512 GB DDR5 module on multiple server platforms. The achievement reinforces Micron's leadership in high-performance, high-capacity server memory and provides enterprise data center and cloud customers with a path to support large and demanding AI, analytics, in-memory database and simulation-heavy workloads with greater efficiency. Leading semiconductor enablers, AMD and Intel, are both actively validating the module, which will deliver speeds up to 9,200 MT/s.

The module's high capacity is possible due to Micron's advanced vertical interconnect packaging innovations. This product vertically stacks DRAM dies interconnected by through-silicon vias (TSVs) to maximize density within individual DRAM packages while preserving the performance modern data center architectures demand. The module enables up to 12 TB of DDR5 DRAM in a single 24-slot dual-socket server.

Chinese memory giant CXMT is reportedly facing difficulties with HBM3 production, according to South Korean media. Late last month, it was revealed that CXMT had begun risk production of HBM3E memory, lagging two generations behind Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron, who are already progressing with HBM4E sampling. At that time, it was known that the company was conducting HBM3E risk production in limited runs, but details were scarce. However, today we learn that three out of four HBM3E stacks are defective, indicating that CXMT currently operates at a 25% yield. Stacking DRAM is a complex task, as the technology required is much more intricate than planar DRAM manufacturing, an area where CXMT reportedly excels.

The low yields are reportedly due to the immaturity of the through-silicon via (TSV) technology that CXMT employs. In front-end manufacturing, CXMT achieves around 30% yields, while back-end processing yields about 70% on top of the original 30%. For instance, Samsung uses about 5,000 TSVs per layer on HBM2, and SK hynix uses more than 8,000 TSVs per layer on its HBM3. However, data suggests that CXMT is attempting to achieve HBM3E with only 3,000 TSVs per layer and is trying to pack 8 layers in the regular 8-Hi HBM3E configuration. Given these challenges, the company is unlikely to transition to a higher-capacity 12-Hi HBM in the near term as it addresses engineering challenges.

SK hynix is shifting much of its capacity to the latest 1c DRAM node, according to recent reports. The South Korean giant is transitioning the bulk of its memory production between nodes, and as DRAM technology advances, the company is moving its production to more advanced 10 nm-class nodes. For SK hynix, the sixth-generation 10 nm class 1c DRAM node accounted for 10% of production in Q1 2026, with an increase to about 13% in Q2. In the current third quarter, the company is expected to manufacture 24% of its DRAM on 1c, while Q4 will see more than a third (34%) produced on that node. By Q1 2027, the 1c node will account for around 35%, making the fifth-generation 10 nm-class 1b node at 33%, officially SK hynix's most dominant node.

As a reminder, DRAM nodes are not the same as conventional logic nodes. DRAM manufacturers use variations of 10 nm and scale them with more EUV layers or advanced features. For SK hynix, the currently dominant 1b node is around 12-13 nm in actual design and involves about 4 layers of EUV patterning, while the most advanced 1c node shrinks to 11-12 nm with 5-6 layers of EUV. SK hynix will use the 1c node to manufacture HBM4E, LPDDR6, and DDR5 memory. For the older 1b node, SK hynix produces DDR5, LPDDR5X, HBM3E, and HBM4.

TrendForce's latest findings on the memory industry reveal that sharp rises in traditional DRAM contract prices have led to a 59.5% QoQ increase in total DRAM industry revenue, reaching nearly US$154.73 billion in 2Q26.

Growing demand for AI servers, fueled by expanding LLM training and AI inference, has driven higher shipments of HBM3e, LPDDR5X, and high-capacity RDIMMS. The surge in agentic AI applications is further boosting RDIMM demand across various capacities.

The latest NAND market share data from Counterpoint Research shows just how far prices have risen in 2026. The global NAND market grew 70% quarter-over-quarter in Q2, following 90% growth in Q1. This is driven almost entirely by rising prices rather than higher shipments. NAND contract prices climbed 55% QoQ in Q2 alone, which lines up with earlier TrendForce estimates pointing to a 70-75% jump over the same stretch. Samsung held onto the top spot with 28% revenue share, down slightly from 29% in Q1 and 32% a year earlier, while SK hynix sits second at 19% and Micron rounds out the top three at 15%, helped along by high selling prices.

The surge traces back to AI infrastructure eating up NAND supply that would otherwise go toward consumer SSDs. Enterprise and hyperscale buyers are stockpiling high-capacity flash for AI servers, and manufacturers have leaned into that shift since it carries far better margins than retail drives. That's left less capacity for client SSDs, and it's part of why consumer drive prices keep climbing even as shipment volumes stay flat. China's YMTC is one of the more interesting movers here, growing from a 9% share a year ago to 14% in Q2, likely picking up volume as the bigger three chase their most profitable enterprise orders instead. Most forecasts still put meaningful price stabilization sometime in 2027, since new NAND capacity takes years to bring online and AI demand shows no sign of slowing.

According to Counterpoint Research trackers, Chinese memory giant CXMT captured 10% of the global DRAM market share by revenue in Q2 2026, which is 150% more than the company had a year ago. On a quarterly basis, the company also experienced significant growth of 25%, as it increased its market share from 8% in Q1 to 10% in Q2. This is impressive considering the company managed to grow its revenue market share despite constrained access to advanced tooling, while established giants like Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have undisputed access to all semiconductor manufacturing tools.

Among other DRAM makers, Samsung retains the number one spot with a 38% share, SK hynix holds 25%, and Micron is just behind at 24%. Interestingly, over the last few quarters, Samsung managed to maintain and grow its number one position, while SK hynix's share dropped from 39% a year ago to the current 25%. Micron fluctuated between 22% and the current 24%, while Nanya doubled its share from 1% to 2%.

Micron is reportedly exploring the idea of developing high-endurance NAND Flash modules that would be positioned closer to the GPU, rather than being located far away in the storage pool behind multiple protocols. The company is said to be investigating ways to bring NAND Flash closer to handle workloads that don't require the latency and bandwidth of traditional HBM or regular DRAM modules. This architecture, currently referred to as "near-GPU NAND," would serve as a middle ground between density and durability. This concept would allow GPUs to access a pool of NAND Flash that has a lower density than conventional TLC or QLC NAND, but instead focuses on improving I/O speeds, bandwidth, and read times.

For instance, this would enable a GPU to access a potential storage pool with hundreds of gigabytes of storage directly on the GPU package or PCB, similar to what DRAM like HBM or GDDR7/LPDDR6 already does. This tier would sit between GPU memory and regular system storage, acting as a very fast buffer, which would be ideal for the inference of massive LLMs. At that point, LLMs wouldn't be memory-bound and could run on systems with fewer GPUs, but with more storage and memory tiers to compensate for the required inference size. Additionally, this NAND would be significantly cheaper than HBM or regular DRAM and would be sized according to system specifications. Images below are HBF slides from SK hynix and Sandisk.

NAND Flash suppliers are broadening their enterprise SSD product lines to boost profits and refine their offerings, according to TrendForce's recent memory industry report. Increased shipment volumes and higher contract prices are expected to propel the combined revenue of the top five enterprise SSD brands to double quarter-over-quarter, reaching $37.59 billion in 2Q26—a staggering 103.6% increase.

TrendForce expects enterprise SSD demand to remain elevated in 3Q26 thanks to the growing adoption of generative AI agent services, steady data center infrastructure deployments by CSPs, and large-scale shipments of NVIDIA GB-series AI server racks. These factors are expected to drive industry revenue even higher. However, rising output from Chinese suppliers and the emergence of China's domestic cloud market could reshape the competitive landscape going forward.

Micron Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), the only U.S.-based manufacturer of memory and storage solutions, today opened a 60,000-square-foot Micron Training Center (MTC) in Boise, a strategic investment to strengthen the skilled talent pipeline, support advanced semiconductor manufacturing and expand education and apprenticeship pathways in Idaho.

Located near Micron's Boise campus, this unique, collaborative training facility accelerates new-hire readiness through an intensive onboarding boot camp and hands-on training in fab operations and manufacturing systems. The center also serves as a site for community college students and career seekers pursuing semiconductor pathways through the College of Western Idaho (CWI).

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) today unveiled Micron Research Labs, a U.S.-based long-horizon premier research institution headquartered in Boise and backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade. Building on Micron's technology and manufacturing leadership, the new hub will bring together customers, academia, government and the broader semiconductor ecosystem to pursue breakthroughs beyond today's technology roadmaps and help define what's possible in the decades ahead. Key research areas include critical memory technologies, advanced memory and compute architectures, packaging and future semiconductor manufacturing.

As the first dedicated memory research hub of its kind in the U.S., Micron Research Labs will center on a flagship Boise campus designed to support advanced research across critical technology domains. The planned investment will also fund extensive university collaborations, global satellite labs and deep ecosystem partnerships, creating a connected research network focused beyond the next generation of technologies for the AI era.

Memory pricing is a hot topic these days as consumers struggle to purchase any, with little hope of prices dropping. Memory costs are reaching new all-time highs, with various trackers reporting that prices in August this year are up to five times more expensive than the same month last year for DRAM kits. According to data from PCPartPicker, DDR5 memory prices have increased anywhere from 372% for 2 x 16 GB 4,800 MT/s kits to 485% for 2 x 32 GB kits running at 5,600 MT/s. A 6,000 MT/s 64 GB kit, which used to cost $222, is now considered a luxury investment at an astounding $1,272. At the TechPowerUp editorial team, we remember when that was the entire budget for building a very decent high-end gaming PC.

PCPartPicker also shows that DDR4 kits have increased by 120% to 177%, which is still significant but mainly affects those using the older DDR4 technology. For those on a newer DDR5 platform, the change is much more pronounced. Note that PCPartPicker only tracks pricing in the United States, while German websites like ComputerBase have reported a 345% year-over-year increase for August in the Eurozone, which is much higher than anything seen before. With no signs of slowing down, we might see even higher year-over-year changes.

TrendForce's latest NAND Flash industry research reveals that AI server demand remained steady in the second quarter of 2026—particularly for enterprise SSDs—resulting in a supply shortage across the NAND Flash market. This allowed suppliers to raise ASPs significantly through contract negotiations. As a result, the combined revenue of the top five publicly listed NAND Flash brands rose 77% QoQ to US$68.87 billion.

Looking ahead to the third quarter, demand from smartphones and PCs is expected to remain weak as higher BOM costs push up device prices. However, demand from AI servers for enterprise SSDs remains strong. Meanwhile, suppliers are generally prioritizing capital expenditure on DRAM and HBM, limiting new NAND Flash capacity. ASPs are therefore expected to continue supporting overall industry revenue growth in the third quarter.

Chinese memory giant CXMT has finally surpassed 9,000 MT/s on the AMD platform, rivaling DRAM kits from Micron, SK hynix, and Samsung. On the Colorful iGame X870E VULCAN W OC motherboard, an iGame Shadow II 24G×2 kit with 48 GB of memory achieved speeds of 9,000 MT/s. In the provided screenshot, the kit runs at 4,507 MHz, which translates to over 9,014 MT/s, thanks to double data rate technology. Late last year, CXMT announced that its DDR5 could reach 8,000 MT/s, but now we see that overclocked memory can exceed these speeds on the AMD platform.

Additionally, CXMT is working on improving latency. Some Colorful iGame Shadow II 24Gx2 48 GB kits are being tested on ASUS motherboards to achieve ultra-low latency, matching the performance of the top three memory manufacturers. On the latest AMD and Intel platforms, Colorful has tested DDR5 kits running at 6,000 MT with CL30 latency and even some preliminary tests with CL28 latency. This is a promising sign that CXMT memory is finally meeting the standards of competing DRAM from the leading memory makers in both transfer rate and latency.

Chinese memory giant CXMT has reportedly achieved a significant milestone in DDR5 production, with manufacturing yields now comfortably above 90%. This is comparable to what major manufacturers like Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron are achieving. According to reports, CXMT uses a 17 nm node for DDR5 chip production and has reached a 90% yield for these chips. This is only 2-3% lower than Samsung's yield on its 10 nm class node for DDR5 production, indicating that CXMT's production quality is matching that of the world's largest memory maker. This is a remarkable achievement for a company that excels in cleanroom construction time, taking only 12 months to build its fab's cleanroom compared to the two years others require. As the company plans to end the year with 350,000 DRAM wafers per month, high yields mean there is little waste or leftover.

Chinese MyDrivers also notes that PC OEMs have mixed reactions to adopting CXMT DRAM in their products. For instance, Dell has completely banned the use of CXMT in its machines, while HP only allows CXMT DRAM in its Chinese PCs. Major Taiwanese brands such as ASUS and Acer have increased adoption in some models, as they have more flexibility in supply chain procurement. However, both companies use CXMT memory for PCs sold in mainland China and some emerging markets, meaning the West is still far from receiving PCs with CXMT memory modules. PC OEMs are also cautious about procuring CXMT memory due to concerns about disrupting their relationships with the big three memory makers.

Chinese YMTC has been on a significant upswing, as confirmed by the global NAND Flash shipment market share tracker for the second quarter of this year. According to Counterpoint Research data, YMTC became the third-largest player in Q2, surpassing some of the biggest names in the industry. Leading the global NAND Flash shipment market share is Samsung, holding 25% of the market. In second place is SK hynix, along with its subsidiary Solidigm, commanding 22% of the market share. However, YMTC has claimed the third spot, with its bit shipments growing 22% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter, edging ahead of Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk.

YMTC's rise to the third-largest player in the NAND Flash industry in Q2 is attributed to the substantial volume of shipments both domestically and internationally. YMTC's Xtacking 4.0 storage architecture is now in mass production with 267-layer 3D NAND, and the path to 300+ layer technology is anticipated for next year. This, combined with a high production volume, has allowed YMTC to surpass established names with ease. However, market share does not equate to revenue share. Despite ranking third in market share, YMTC only ranked fifth in revenue share among vendors. This is because YMTC is currently focusing on consumer electronics, while Micron, Kioxia, and other vendors concentrate on the more profitable enterprise server and AI sectors.