Micron Technology just told the market something it didn’t expect to hear: the global memory chip shortage isn’t going away anytime soon. The company’s fiscal Q3 2026 earnings, reported on June 24, revealed that supply constraints previously expected to ease by early 2027 will now persist well beyond that date.
The culprit is AI. Demand for high-bandwidth memory and DRAM products built for data centers has surged past every prior forecast, and new manufacturing capacity simply can’t come online fast enough to close the gap.
The numbers behind the squeeze
Micron’s latest guidance represents a meaningful revision from earlier projections. The company and its competitors, Samsung and SK Hynix, had previously suggested the tight supply environment would begin loosening around early 2027.
That timeline is now obsolete. Micron’s management has updated its outlook to reflect an acceleration in AI inference and training workloads that continues to outstrip supply additions across the entire industry.
