If you have been waiting for RAM prices to come back down, Micron has bad news. The memory maker says shortages will last into 2028 and possibly beyond, and it has already sold most of the memory it will make next year.
CEO Sanjay Mehrotra gave the warning on Micron's fiscal 2026 earnings call, where he also told investors that customers will pay much higher prices next year than they did this year.
Micron Cannot See the End of It
Mehrotra said Micron expects demand to outrun supply in both 2027 and 2028, with the market getting even tighter than it is in 2026. He added that the company has no line of sight yet on when supply and demand will come back into balance.
New factories will not fix that quickly. Micron's first new fab in Boise, Idaho, is due next year, more capacity follows in 2028, and the company plans to spend $25 billion on expansion in the first half of its new financial year. Its executives still warned that the new plants will not immediately improve availability or bring prices down.
Blame the AI Boom
The squeeze comes from AI. Chips from Nvidia and AMD need more and more high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a stacked form of DRAM, and the world's suppliers cannot make enough of it. Mehrotra said HBM demand is growing faster than demand for the DRAM used in servers.
That is already showing up in what people pay. The shortage has driven up memory costs and raised prices on consumer electronics such as Apple's iPads and MacBooks.
Read more: Sony PlayStation 6 Faces Potential Delay to 2029 Due to RAM Shortages
It is paying off for Micron. Its DRAM sales reached $39.8 billion last quarter, up 343% from a year earlier, and its stock has climbed more than 500% in the past year, taking its market value past $1.2 trillion.
What It Means for Your Next Upgrade
PC builders have noticed. A post on Reddit's r/pcmasterrace saying RAM prices are officially out of control has drawn more than 2,400 upvotes.
Micron is spending $250 billion on two new HBM campuses, the largest of which broke ground in Clay, New York, in January, and rivals SK Hynix and Samsung are building new HBM factories in South Korea. Until that capacity arrives, Micron expects demand to keep running ahead of supply.
Photo: Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
