Samsung, SK Hynix inventories fall below 10 days amid historic memory chip shortage

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix ↗ 2.78% now hold less than 10 days of memory chip inventory, according to a report released by South Korean brokerage KB Securities on September 7, in what the firm's head of research Kim Dong-won called a "historic shortage" poised to worsen sharply next year.bitget+2

The report warns that bit demand for both DRAM and NAND will exceed supply by more than 10 percentage points in 2027, raising the possibility that available memory stocks could be effectively exhausted. The forecast arrives as the global memory market — already strained by more than a year of escalating prices — enters what the industry has taken to calling "RAMageddon".sedaily+3

AI's Insatiable Appetite

The root cause is structural, not cyclical. Hyperscale cloud providers are pouring money into AI data centers at an unprecedented pace, with KB Securities projecting infrastructure spending will reach $1.3 trillion next year, roughly 60 percent above 2026 levels. Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ↘ 0.36% expects U.S. big tech capital expenditures alone to climb from around $800 billion to approximately $1.2 trillion.asiae+1

The transition to sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory, HBM4, is at the center of the squeeze. Each HBM4 wafer consumes manufacturing capacity equivalent to three standard DRAM wafers, meaning every unit of HBM4 production directly compresses commodity memory supply. Micron Technology ↗ 5.12% confirmed that ratio in an interview with The Verge, where president and COO Manish Bhatia acknowledged the industry faces "a very different challenge" from prior cycles. Three manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — control roughly 90 percent of the global memory market, according to Counterpoint Research, leaving the world dependent on a handful of firms to divide finite capacity between AI infrastructure and everything else.bitget+1

Ripple Effects Across the Industry

The consequences are spreading well beyond server rooms. DDR5 RAM prices have surged nearly fivefold year over year for some consumer kits, while 2TB NVMe SSD prices have more than doubled. Counterpoint estimates that smartphone DRAM costs rose about 83 percent quarter over quarter in Q2 2026, with 16GB of mobile DRAM climbing from roughly $42 to $181 in a single year. Apple ↘ 0.52% is expected to raise iPhone prices when it unveils the next generation this week, a move analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has linked directly to memory constraints that have already forced the company to trim 2026 hardware shipments.tech-insider+3

Nvidia ↗ 2.78% has made perhaps the most visible concession, opting to skip a consumer GPU generation entirely for the first time in the company's 27-year history, routing all available memory toward its AI accelerators. MediaTek is recycling four-year-old chip designs simply to accommodate newer memory standards after Samsung stopped taking orders for legacy LPDDR4X.ad-hoc-news+1

No Quick Fix

Relief is not imminent. Micron's massive new fabrication complex near Syracuse, New York, is not expected to produce meaningful output until 2030. Counterpoint and IDC both project the shortage will persist through 2027 and into early 2028 at the earliest. SK Hynix's 600-trillion-won Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, which aims to double the company's capacity, still targets completion no sooner than 2033.wikipedia+1

"We've said that right now it'll be beyond 2027, and we don't see when it closes just because demand continues to grow so fast," Bhatia told The Verge.theverge