Commentary
Chip scarcity is forcing up memory prices and making the likes of Micron and SK Hynix astonishingly profitable. That's a guarantee of trouble, says Chris Bryant for Bloomberg Opinion.
File photo of a Micron logo taken on November 5, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov)
12 Jul 2026 06:00AM
BERLIN: Micron Technology and its South Korean peers face an intractable problem. With data centres for artificial intelligence gobbling up supplies of their memory chips, there aren’t enough to go around.This scarcity is forcing up memory prices and making Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics astonishingly profitable. But customers are unhappy, governments could intervene and shortages may open the door to Chinese rivals.As recently as 2023 memory manufacturers were suffering huge losses as demand and selling prices collapsed. This is still a cyclical industry, but I think the bigger risk right now is this trio of companies being viewed as making too much money, rather than too little.While their shares are well below this year’s record peak, their valuations have each surpassed US$1 trillion. In aggregate they’ll generate US$1.4 trillion of free cash flow in the next three years, if analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg prove correct.
