If you thought RAM and storage prices were going to give us a break, the news coming from Micron is not encouraging at all.
The company has made it clear that the chip shortage is not only going to continue, but that the market will become even tighter between 2027 and 2028.
Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron, confirmed during the presentation of the company’s latest financial results that demand is far exceeding global production capacity. In fact, more than 75% of all the DRAM memory the company will produce in 2027 has already been sold in advance through long-term contracts with major customers.
AI Boom Could Make RAM and Storage More Expensive Through 2028
The main reason behind this situation? As you might expect, artificial intelligence. The rapid construction of new data centers to run AI models requires huge amounts of high-speed memory. Factories are prioritizing these huge orders because they offer much higher profit margins, which reduces the share of production available for the traditional consumer market.
Sanjay Mehrotra 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.
Building new semiconductor manufacturing plants is not something that can be done in a few months; it requires years of planning and billions in investment. Because of this, although Micron and other manufacturers are expanding their facilities, the gap between supply and demand will continue for quite some time. Mehrotra admitted that even they do not know exactly when balance could return to the industry.
For PC users, this means a difficult situation. The manufacturing costs of any device that uses memory, from graphics cards and computers to boards such as the Raspberry Pi or mobile phones, will continue to rise. In the short term, the only thing that could make components cheaper would be a sudden slowdown in AI investment, which does not appear likely to happen.
