AI Memory Shortage 2026: RAM, SSD Prices Explained

Samsung just posted the biggest quarterly profit in its history — and your next laptop is competing with the reason why.

On 29 October 2026, Samsung Electronics confirmed final third-quarter results: operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, roughly $80 billion, nearly nine times the 12.2 trillion won it earned a year earlier, on revenue of 195.3 trillion won. It was the company's fourth straight record quarter. Yet Samsung's shares fell around 5–6% in Seoul on the day, because investors had already priced in the record — and because the details underneath it contain a warning for everyone who buys computers.

Almost all of that profit came from one place: chips. Samsung's semiconductor division reported revenue of 147.1 trillion won and operating profit of 106.5 trillion won — about 99% of the group's total. Memory alone brought in 140.7 trillion won, up 427% from a year earlier. Meanwhile Samsung's own device division, which sells phones, TVs and home appliances, booked an operating loss of 800 billion won, its second straight quarterly loss, as higher memory prices raised its component costs.

In other words, the world's largest memory maker is making record money selling memory, while its own phone business is squeezed by the cost of that same memory. That tension is the whole story of this shortage — and it is now reaching your shopping list.

Why AI data centres are eating your RAM

The shortage is not a mystery, and it is not one company's doing. It is a reallocation. AI training and inference run on accelerators that need high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — stacked DRAM packaged to feed data to chips far faster than conventional memory can. Around those accelerators sit servers full of conventional DRAM and enterprise SSDs. All of it competes for the same wafer capacity in the same fabs.

Chipmakers follow the margin. HBM and server memory earn far more per wafer than the DRAM in a consumer laptop, so capacity shifts toward data centres first. Samsung's memory chief, Jaejune Kim, told analysts that Samsung's 2027 HBM supply is already sold out at an agreed target price — and that the company continues to receive requests for additional supply it cannot promise. Samsung said it expects the shortage to deepen next year. Rival SK Hynix, which reported strong earnings a day earlier, echoed the same outlook.

This is the same build-out behind the week's earnings story. Alphabet spent $51.36 billion in a single quarter on AI capacity, as we covered in Alphabet vs Microsoft Q3 2026 earnings. That spending does not just buy buildings and power — it buys memory, in volumes consumer markets have never had to compete with. The financing side of the same boom, from SpaceX's $40 billion GPU lease to the accelerators in our Nvidia Nemotron 3 Ultra explainer, all points the same way: the data centre is now the memory market's biggest customer, and everyone else queues behind it.

What is actually tight — and what is only forecast

Honest buyer guidance starts with separating three things: what is confirmed, what is forecast, and what is hype.

Confirmed. Samsung's record quarter and its 2027 HBM sell-out are confirmed by the company's own results and earnings call, reported by Reuters on 29 October. The shortage deepening into 2027 is Samsung's and SK Hynix's stated expectation, not a journalist's guess.

Forecast. Research firm TrendForce's 30 September forecast puts conventional DRAM contract prices up 10–15% quarter on quarter in Q4 2026, and NAND flash up 15–20%. Analysts cited by Reuters see HBM prices more than doubling in 2027. These are forecasts from named sources, and they could be wrong — but they are the best public guide to direction, and they all point the same way for the next few months.

Hype to ignore. Any claim that a specific laptop, phone or SSD "will" cost a specific amount more by a specific date. Contract prices are what big buyers pay chipmakers; they reach shop shelves later, unevenly, and mixed with inventory levels, competition and tariff effects. TrendForce itself warns that notebook brands in 2027 will have to choose between raising retail prices, absorbing costs at the expense of margins, or cutting specifications. That means the same shortage can show up as a higher price, a weaker spec sheet, or both — and you cannot predict which from a contract-price forecast alone.

The most useful nuance in the forecasts is a split. DRAM and NAND are heading in different directions in 2027, according to TrendForce: DRAM supply is likely to stay tight all year, while NAND constraints could ease in the second half of 2027 as new capacity comes online. That matters because RAM is DRAM and SSDs are NAND — so the two upgrades in your machine may not move together.

What to buy now, what to wait on

This is guidance, not a guarantee — prices move for many reasons, and no forecast in this article should be read as a promise. But the evidence supports a clear order of priorities.

Buy now if you are buying anyway: RAM capacity. This is the single most important decision, and it is most urgent in laptops. Many thin laptops have soldered RAM that can never be upgraded, so the configuration you buy is the configuration you live with for the device's life. If you are choosing between a cheaper model with 8GB and a pricier one with 16GB or 32GB, the shortage strengthens the case for the larger option — DRAM is the tighter market, and the upgrade cannot be done later. For desktop builders, buying the RAM kit with the build, rather than planning to add sticks in six months, avoids paying a possibly higher price for the second half of the upgrade.

Wait if you can: SSD upgrades. SSDs face the same near-term pressure, but NAND has the clearer relief path in the second half of 2027, and adding or replacing an SSD later is usually a ten-minute job on a desktop and a straightforward one on many laptops. If your current drive is not full, waiting is reasonable. If it is full, buy what you need — a full drive slows a machine down today, and that cost is certain while future savings are not.

Be sceptical of "shortage sale" urgency. Retailers know a shortage story sells, and a discount from an inflated price is not a bargain. Compare the price against what the same product cost a few months ago where you can, check the exact specification (capacity, speed, generation — DDR5 versus DDR4 RAM, for example, are not interchangeable), and confirm compatibility with your machine before ordering. The most expensive mistake in a shortage is not paying slightly more — it is buying the wrong part in a hurry.

For phones, the effect is indirect but real. You cannot upgrade a phone's RAM or storage after purchase, and memory is a growing share of a phone's component cost. Buy the storage tier you will actually need over the phone's life, and expect 2027 models to either cost more or quietly trim specs elsewhere to hold their price.

What could change the story

Three things would loosen the market, and all three are worth watching rather than assuming. First, new fab capacity: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are all spending heavily, but new cleanroom space takes years to become finished chips, so relief from today's building is a 2028 story, not a 2027 one. Second, demand: if data-centre spending slows or consumer demand weakens further, memory could free up faster than forecasts assume. Third, the cycle itself: memory prices have crashed before — in late 2018 after a data-centre buying boom, and again after the pandemic surge — when buyers had stocked up and new supply arrived at once. Nobody can time that turn, but its history is a reason not to treat today's prices as permanent, and not to hoard components you do not need.

The bottom line is unglamorous: buy the RAM you will need for the life of the device when you buy the device, upgrade storage when you need it, and ignore anyone selling you a precise price prediction for next year. Forecasts tell you the direction. They do not tell you the price tag.

Recommended Reading

If you want the backstory behind how the AI industry reached this scale of spending, Karen Hao's Empire of AI traces the rise of the companies now driving the chip boom. Read more on Empire of AI at BookNest.

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No affiliate links for the hardware in this article — tool and component names are plain text, and no retailer prices are quoted, since prices change frequently. Check the retailer's live page before buying. The featured image is an original AI-generated illustration, not a photograph.

Sources: Reuters — Samsung posts record profit in Q3 on AI chip boom · TrendForce Q4 2026 memory forecast, via Pandromeda summary · TrendForce notebook outlook, via 9to5Mac