Business

Unprecedented Memory Shortage Gives Chipmakers Sustained Boost
By Reuters | 05 Jan, 2026

Prices for some types of memory chips have doubled since last February as the major memory chipmakers shifted production to the high-bandwidth memory demanded by the AI infrastructure boom.

Shares of the world's top memory chip providers rose on Monday as investors bet on further price gains due to a global supply crunch driven by surging demand for artificial-intelligence infrastructure.

Samsung co-CEO TM Roh described the shortage as "unprecedented" in an interview with Reuters, echoing peers who have warned that constraints could persist for months, if not years, as the race to build AI infrastructure consumes supply.

That demand has prompted memory chipmakers to divert manufacturing capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, squeezing supply to almost every other sector such as flash chips used in USB drives and smartphones.

Prices in some segments have more than doubled since February last year, according to market-research firm TrendForce, drawing in traders betting that the rally has further to run. 

Micron rose about 2% in early trading on Monday. South Korea-listed shares of SK Hynix and Samsung closed up nearly 3% and 7.5%, respectively. 

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said last month he expects memory markets to remain tight past 2026. The company's shares gained a whopping 240% in 2025, far outpacing the benchmark chip index's 42% gain.

Samsung's shares more than doubled in value last year, while SK Hynix jumped nearly four-fold. 

Smaller peers Western Digital, Applied Digital and Seagate Technology rose more than 3% on Monday. SanDisk was up about 1.5%. 

Memory is a highly cyclical industry, characteristically experiencing extreme downturns and highs with volatile pricing levels.

Analysts from Morningstar and J.P. Morgan have estimated that the ongoing upturn, routinely referred to as the "supercycle", might persist well into 2027.

(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)