Samsung doubles its most advanced memory line
Samsung Electronics has laid out a plan to double output of HBM4 and HBM4E memory next year, according to Seoul Economic Daily. HBM4 is the generation of stacked high-bandwidth memory designed to sit beside Nvidia-class accelerators in AI data centres. Doubling that output would be one of the largest single capacity commitments in the memory industry this decade, and it shows Samsung expects AI infrastructure spending to keep rising through 2027.
The bottleneck has moved from logic to memory
For most of the AI buildout, the constraint was advanced logic manufacturing and packaging. That has changed. The near-term supply of HBM3E is sold out, and makers have shifted wafer capacity away from commodity DRAM and NAND to serve AI customers. DRAM prices have risen about 171 per cent year over year and DDR5 spot prices have roughly quadrupled since late 2025. By 2027, a single next-generation Nvidia processor could carry as much as 384GB of HBM, according to CSIS analysis, a figure that would absorb a large share of one supplier's quarterly output.
Costs reach buyers of ordinary hardware
The shortage is spreading beyond data centres. PC makers including Dell, Lenovo, Apple and Microsoft have tied price increases to memory costs, with Dell expecting double-digit price rises for some personal computers. On the equipment side, ASML reported net orders of 5.4 billion euros in a recent quarter, driven by AI demand, while flagging a likely decline in Chinese orders for 2026. SK hynix shares have traded near record levels in Seoul. The question for next year is whether new capacity arrives before memory prices start cutting into the economics of building and running AI systems, or whether the shortage simply caps how many accelerators the industry can deploy.
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