RAM and SSD prices look set to climb further, and the people making the chips say this could run well into the next decade.
An employee at Chinese memory maker YMTC told The Wire China the company expects the global memory shortage to last at least three more years. The remark, surfaced by analyst Jukan of Citrini Research and picked up by TweakTown, says YMTC has already raised its own chip prices and is shifting production toward higher-margin parts. Separately, TrendForce reports DRAM supply is "very tight," with early talks on fourth-quarter 2026 contract pricing pointing to "meaningful price increases" driven largely by demand from US cloud service providers.
This matters beyond RAM sticks. YMTC is the third-largest NAND supplier in the world, behind only Samsung and SK Hynix, so a pivot toward pricier chips could tighten SSD supply too. Context: DDR5 prices in Germany are already up 544% from before the crisis started, so "meaningful" increases on top of that are not a small ask for anyone buying laptops, servers, or anything with a storage slot.
Worth remembering that YMTC is heading into an IPO, so talking up scarcity and pricing power flatters its own numbers. That said, the three-year timeline isn't coming from YMTC alone - Nvidia's CEO and other industry voices have floated similar forecasts, which makes this less a single company's spin and more a shared, gloomy consensus.