The head honcho of Micron, Sanjay Mehrotra, says that memory may be even harder to come by in the next two years than it is today. Now, a memory company's CEO is gonna say stuff like that during a historically momentous upturn in its business— anything to the contrary would be bad news for its share price—but it is a stark warning for all of us regular consumers still feeling the burn of the memory crisis.
"Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call," says Mehrotra during the company's Q4 earnings call (transcript from Investing.com), "and we expect memory and storage supply demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026."
Here's Mehrotra again later in the call:
"We expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026."
And again…
"As we noted, in calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply."
Alright, thanks, Mehrotra.
"We have shared with you that we do not see line of sight when supply catches up with demand."
Enough!
Mehrotra says this mostly comes down to AI, which is no surprise, with growing demand for agents, bigger models, and growing context. And it's not just Micron. Samsung came out this week with a similar warning: HBM demand is surging (that's the memory most often used for AI accelerators) and is expected to take another 10% of Samsung's capacity next year. As Samsung's capacity is finite and new fabs take a very long time, that's actively taking away capacity from DRAM, meaning DRAM supply may be more limited next year.
Mehrotra said something similar in the latest earnings call about capacity:
"We see continuing tight supply conditions because, first of all, clean rooms take a long while to build. Even after they are built, even after first wafer output, production ramps up only gradually in the clean rooms. That’s just the nature of what it takes to bring up production."
Yes, so that's bad news for us lot. Price rises that are biting now will continue to bite throughout the next few years. And that will affect product launches and MSRPs. We're expecting two new generations of graphics cards in that time (Vera Rubin and RDNA 5), two next-gen consoles, and a pile of CPUs from Intel and AMD. What does it mean for those? Nothing good.
On the flip side, we have heard from a CEO with a little less skin in the game, and they were more critical of the supposed memory crisis. Acer's CEO reportedly said it's "impossible for the shortage to last until 2030" and said some of this is just messaging to keep margins high and share prices plump. There are other dissenting voices, too, such as Michael Burry of 'big short' fame. He suggests the AI bubble may burst sooner rather than later, citing the Acer CEO's comments and accelerating timelines for the shortage coming to a close.
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