Contract prices still rising
The steepest part of the memory price surge may be over, but the climb continues. In its latest pricing survey, TrendForce projected conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 13% to 18% quarter on quarter in the third quarter of 2026, with NAND Flash contracts up 10% to 15%. That is a slowdown from earlier in the year, not a reversal. On the spot market, mainstream DDR4 chips edged from $45.79 to $46.04 between 16 and 22 September, while DDR5 trading stayed cautious.
Server memory is behaving differently from everything else. Long-term supply agreements between the big buyers and the memory makers are quietly capping prices for high-volume server DRAM, which is why the loudest increases are now showing up in consumer parts rather than in data centre contracts.
Who pays: notebooks and phones
Notebook manufacturers are still replenishing inventories, but higher memory costs are feeding into retail prices, a trend TrendForce expects to weigh on PC shipments for the rest of the year. Smartphone vendors face the same squeeze in a worse place, because memory takes a larger share of the hardware cost of an affordable handset. Many are raising prices and becoming more cautious about production plans.
Gartner's forecast from February put numbers on the damage: a 130% surge in combined DRAM and solid-state drive prices by the end of 2026, translating into PC prices 17% higher and smartphone prices 13% higher than in 2025, with global PC shipments down 10.4% and smartphone shipments down 8.4%. Entry-level buyers are expected to leave the market five times faster than premium buyers.
Where the capacity goes
The cause is not a shortage of factories but a change in what they build. AI accelerators need high-bandwidth memory, and that is where wafers and capital are pointed. Samsung has begun shipping 8-layer HBM4E stacks to Nvidia, HBM4 yields have climbed toward 80% ahead of Nvidia's Rubin platform, and SK hynix plans to double wafer capacity within five years with 2026 capital spending above 30 trillion won. Analysts linked to South Korea's central bank concluded this month that the country's lead over China in memory production is likely to widen. Consumer memory buyers are simply at the back of that queue.
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