Since this is a translation of an overseas article, there may be some mistranslations.
https://www.avcesar.com/marche-memoire-dram-et-nand-2026-crise-historique-et-envolee-des-prix-face-au-rouleau-compresseur-de-l-ia-48042
DRAM and NAND Memory Market in 2026: Facing a Historic Crisis and Soaring Prices Amidst the AI Wave
The global memory market is experiencing an unprecedented period of turmoil in 2026.
According to a recent report by analysis firm Omdia, the explosion of large-scale investments in AI infrastructure has created a complete imbalance between supply and demand, leading to structural shortages and unprecedented price increases.
Manufacturing companies are forced to shift production capacity en masse, sacrificing consumer electronics directly in order to stockpile quantities for operational servers.
This deep market restructuring is leading to structural shortages and unprecedented price increases. The DRAM industry's revenue is projected to grow an impressive +147% year-on-year, reaching $372 billion in 2026, while the NAND memory segment is expected to reach a record high of $300 billion (+311% increase). (See chart below)
Record Revenue Masking Supply Crisis
However, these impressive figures do not necessarily indicate a healthy market state. They reflect the fact that global capital and production capacity have been concentrated on AI-specific infrastructure, leaving the existing consumer electronics market in a chronic shortage. The AI cycle has fundamentally broken the historical growth model driven by sales volume. The bottleneck of computing has shifted from processors to memory.
To meet the demands of complex workloads such as AI inference or multi-agent collaboration, the average DRAM capacity per server is projected to increase by 39% year-on-year, reaching 1,432GB in 2026. As new generations of server platforms emerge, system memory is now evolving faster than the internal bandwidth of chips can absorb, leading to context becoming a limiting factor for performance.
Mobile Memory Prices Surge by Up to +100%
The DRAM demand fulfillment ratio has remained below 1 throughout 2025, and there are no signs of normalization in the four quarters of 2026. This structural tension, exacerbated by the prioritization given to high bandwidth memory (HBM) in production, is leading to a comprehensive price reassessment across the entire memory product line.
In the first quarter of 2026, server DDR4/DDR5 prices surged by 60% to 80%, while mobile memory LPDDR5X prices increased by 80% to 100%. (See chart above) The memory market is undergoing a permanent shift where technological intensity outweighs volume. By prioritizing high-margin components for cloud services, manufacturers are creating persistent price increases and scarcity of consumer market components.
This extreme tension in the distribution and pricing of DRAM and NAND memory is expected to persist throughout 2026 and is already signaling its impact into 2027.
▶ Source: https://www.avcesar.com/marche-memoire-dram-et-nand-2026-crise-historique-et-envolee-des-prix-face-au-rouleau-compresseur-de-l-ia-48042
