Missing a word
"expected to double AGAIN"
DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit
The memory shortage is worse than most of us first thought. Prices on DRAM and NAND flash memory are expected to surge in the first quarter of 2026 as AI-driven hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to strain supply chains. In early January, the industry watchers at TrendForce warned the contract prices of …
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Tuesday 3rd February 2026 13:25 GMT Roland6
Re: Missing a word
Definitely, I expect the fab operators to be looking to increase margins to enable them to more easily pay for the enlargement and refurbishment of their Fabs.
An interesting consideration is whether you treat the AI demand as just a 1~3 year bubble and thus don’t increase Fab capacity, as when the downturn hits…
I’m tempted to suggest TSMC have enough capacity under construction that they won’t be increasing production instead they will be increasing prices to moderate demand in line with supply.
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Tuesday 3rd February 2026 02:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'll be dramned!
There was a time when capacitors were 'expensive' and manufacturing cheap ones seemed like a great way to profit ... and that turned into the great capacitor plague that we've all known and 'loved' (in a swear-word infested kind of way).
Let's hope this here memory shortage doesn't turn into that!
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Wednesday 4th February 2026 00:05 GMT Eric 9001
Re: I'll be dramned!
Severely limited writes and even somewhat limited reads are more of a consequence of physics rather than being solely intentional.
How much MLC, TLC & QLC cuts the write lifespan is unwanted, as it's very annoying to implement wear leveling good enough to give a long enough service life (i.e. outlasts the warranty).
It is the case that very high write endurance is unwanted - for example 3D XPoint was discontinued, as it seems fast 100 full writes a day for 5 years, worth of endurance was deemed too high.
It wouldn't be impossible to make a large enough ECC DDR3 RAMdisk SSD with a replaceable slow eMMC or microsd as the unpowered store for power loss (a few cheap 18650 cells should supply enough power to dump 256GB to a slow microsd card), but the endurance of that would be far too high, thus it has not been manufactured (a 8GB RAMdisk with NAND unpowered store for servers was made quite a while ago, with supercapacitor backup, which was for some reason poorly designed, so that the supercapacitor would fail and destroy the board after a few years).
While the encoding technique of HDDs allows for effectively unlimited writes and reads and the implementing hardware could be constructed with 10+ year endurance (a decent electric motor last decades and an actuating mechanism could be made to last decades too), but of course the manufacturer uses a 3rd rate electric motor and actuating mechanism.
But, as even 3rd rate HDD mechanisms and TLC flash could last too long, it is of course ensured that the control software likely corrupts itself after ~5 years of runtime.
The result is that decent HDD's and SSD's last more or less the same amount of time for standard usages.
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Tuesday 3rd February 2026 13:11 GMT Roland6
Re: I'll be dramned!
Could go full cycle. In the last decade of his working life my late father and a small group of colleagues got huge pay increases and other benefits, provided they worked until state retirement age. They were the only ones who had any experience of high performance valves and valve circuitry - from the era of valves, discovered to be necessary to maintain voltage and power stability in the highly sensitive digital test and measurement equipment they manufactured. My dad’s laugh about some of the kit they produced went to the military, the only place producing valves of the required size and quality was Russia…
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Tuesday 3rd February 2026 07:57 GMT blu3b3rry
Ugh
I've already seen PCs for sale on eBay that are being sold "barebone" for approximately half their usual value. Presumably the RAM is now worth far more than the computer itself....
Recently upgraded a few work machines to W11 and it really doesn't feel like the performance requirements it has square against the increasing squeeze that is likely to happen with memory capacity in newer computers.
One W11 laptop is a pretty quick 11th gen i5 but is heavily kneecapped by its 8GB single-channel ram. The OS swallows just over 50% all to itself leaving precious little to one side for Outlook and Teams to argue over, never mind opening any documents! It slows the machine to the point it feels like it's running a 5400rpm spinner in there instead of NVMe.
All this is likely to do is drive people away to Chromebooks and tablets even more than they are already.....
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Tuesday 3rd February 2026 13:01 GMT Roland6
Re: Ugh
I expect many (both private and business) who purchased cheap laptops - which by definition have limited memory and expansion and tend to use low speed memory, will be complaining about how slow W11 in it’s AI/Copilot intregrated version slows their machine down.
The concern is with large increases in price, more people will be tempted or budget constrained to purchase budget replacement systems…
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Wednesday 4th February 2026 10:54 GMT file
Bloat
We were using 512MB LPDDR4 on a headless Linux product, but a few months back we were told that part is no longer available and had to switch to 1GB. Now we've been told that is no longer available and have to order 2GB parts... It seems like suppliers are trying to lock in longer term volume.
Lead times have also gone out to 52 weeks and price is on allocation, typically a few weeks before shipment.
Fun times
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Thursday 5th February 2026 08:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Maybe combine it with the other scam NTF?
Rather than buying up everything, ducking us all, and stashing it in a warehouse coz they don't have the power to actually run it. How about they create a bunch of NTFs AI assets which they can trade to keep the gravy train going and keep selling the actual stuff to people who need it at an actual reasonable rate?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
