The AI boom has broken the memory market’s oldest rule. Prices that should be falling are soaring instead, and the AI memory crunch will not ease until 2028. The hangover, when it comes, could be brutal.
Memory is meant to be boring. For decades DRAM and NAND flash have behaved like any commodity, sliding through predictable booms and busts as new factories flood the market and crater prices. That cycle has now snapped.
As The Register lays out, the AI build-out has devoured every spare chip, and the result is an AI memory crunch with no quick way out.
The cycle that broke
By the old rules, 2025 and 2026 should have been a down-year. Prices should have drifted lower as supply caught up. Instead they climbed. GPU servers need vast amounts of high-bandwidth memory, DDR5 and NAND, and that demand has swallowed the lot.
