《内存涨价5-7倍，一个做AI算力嘅人点睇》Memory Up 5-7x: Notes from an AI Compute Insider

[Hany's take]
Memory is up five to seven times and the shortage is being talked about into 2028. This is not an ordinary cycle — AI has rewritten the whole structure of storage demand. For anyone in the compute business, what you watch is not the price. It is who has stock and who can lock in a long-term contract.

On 17 September 2026 the chip and storage daily landed in front of me: seven items, every one of them about money.

Intel CEO Chen Liwu issued a warning: memory prices have already risen to five, six, even seven times the original level; many companies cannot get enough memory and are being forced to delay expansion; power and cooling will become the next bottleneck; and the supply-demand imbalance is expected to run to 2028.

Why has it gone up this much?

The reason is straightforward: AI demand is pushing up HBM consumption, pressure on general-purpose DRAM supply is rising sharply, and the whole industry is short of capacity. Memory used to be a computer accessory. Now memory is AI infrastructure. The status is completely different.

Micron has just shown the world's first 512GB DDR5 server memory module, using 3D vertical stacking, at speeds up to 9200MT/s, with power consumption down by 60 per cent, and up to 12TB in a single 24-slot server. AMD and Intel are validating it in parallel, with mass production in the second half of 2027. The technology keeps getting better, but mass production never catches up with demand.

The era of long contracts is here, and smaller players will struggle harder for stock

Samsung is considering changing DRAM contracts from quarterly to three-to-five-year agreements, and is deepening cooperation with AMD as the main HBM4 supplier for MI455X. Samsung currently holds 22 per cent of the HBM market and aims to close in on SK Hynix after 2027.

Team Group's general manager also said storage will keep rising in the fourth quarter, the DRAM gap is very clear, and original manufacturers' capacity has been fully wrapped up by long contracts, with the worst shortage in the first half of 2027. In plain language: the big players have locked down capacity, and it will only get harder for small and medium companies to grab stock.

I have done trade for more than twenty years and know this game best. When electronics were short in the past, big distributors also looked after big customers first. Memory has simply moved that playbook into the AI era, with numbers ten times larger and cycles three years longer.

Domestic players are catching up, but distant water cannot put out a nearby fire

ChangXin's new Shanghai plant began equipment tendering on 11 September. The long-term plan is 600,000 wafers a month, adding 70,000 to 80,000 wafers a year from 2024 to 2028, reaching 750,000 wafers a month in 2028, with global market share rising from 8 per cent in 2024 to close to 20 per cent in 2027.

The direction is right, but the timing gap is real. The mass production peak only comes in 2027 and 2028, and through the empty window from now to 2028, prices will only stay high. It is the same conclusion as my last piece on the three hurdles for domestic chips: software, trust and supply chain — everything takes time.

South Korea's semiconductor exports hit 16.48 billion US dollars in the first ten days of September, up 270 per cent year on year, accounting for 47 per cent of total exports. The numbers are wild, but they show exactly what a storage demand surge under the AI supercycle looks like. This is not a joke.

What does it mean for those of us in compute?

First, HBM prices directly determine server costs. With memory up five to seven times, servers cannot avoid raising prices. The story of B300s selling for 14.5 million will continue — not hype, but cost pushing from underneath.

Second, renting beats buying outright. Not everyone can put down 14.5 million at once, while 190,000 a month plus a queue opens the door for small and medium customers. Over the next two years, compute rental is the biggest opportunity, and I am even more solid on that judgement now.

Third, having supply and long contracts is the real moat. Everyone can talk technology, but whoever can get the goods and lock the price is the one with real competitiveness. My generation came out of trade, and our strength is exactly here: knowing people, knowing goods, knowing timing.

The Samsung S26 will raise its Korean retail price by 149,600 won from 1 October, because of storage costs and exchange rates. Even the end product is passing costs on. No one along the whole chain can stay untouched.

A shortage is not a short-term matter. It is a structural opportunity. Whoever can hold supply at a high price point will eat the biggest piece in the next round. So — do you have stock in hand, or are you still waiting for a price cut?

Sources: chip and storage daily, 2026-09-17, drawing on Caifu Hao, Micron investor relations, CFM flash memory market, TradingKey and other public reports. This is a Hany blog review.