DDR at the price of good CPUs: Samsung and SK Hynix will raise memory costs even higher in the second half of the year
Samsung and SK Hynix told customers to expect higher contract prices for DRAM in Q2 2026. The culprit: a capacity crunch — Samsung’s factories are covering only about 60% of current market demand (≈60%).
Prices have already jumped dramatically: what cost $1.30 a year ago has been trading around $13 in February — roughly a tenfold rise. Hard to ignore.
Big firms with long-term deals (e.g., NVIDIA, Apple) are in a safer position; the pain lands on SMBs. Those without locked-in quotas will find themselves scrambling.
Gartner’s view: memory costs — DRAM and SSD — could climb as much as 130% by year-end. Manufacturing capacity at the “big three” (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is essentially flat vs. last year; SK Hynix plans a ~7% increase, which won’t close the gap.
Buyers aren’t bargaining so much as trying to carve out supply quotas. The inevitable fallout: pricier memory means more expensive end devices — from graphics cards/GPU rigs to laptops and smartphones.