Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has a message for anyone hoping the memory chip crunch would ease up soon: keep waiting.
During the company’s fiscal Q1 2026 earnings call, Mehrotra made clear that tight supply-demand dynamics for both DRAM and NAND flash memory will persist well into and beyond 2026. The culprit is a familiar one: artificial intelligence is eating the world’s memory supply, and there simply aren’t enough chips to go around.
The numbers behind the squeeze
Micron posted record quarterly revenue of $13.64B for fiscal Q1 2026, up from $8.71B in the year-ago period. That’s a 56% jump, and yet the company still can’t keep pace with demand.
Customers are currently receiving only 50% to 66% of the memory volumes they actually request. If a PC maker orders 100 units of memory, they’re getting somewhere between 50 and 66. That’s a structural bottleneck rippling through the entire electronics supply chain.
