IDC published an updated report last week (
link). Some selected quotes:
“However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. For decades, the production of DRAM and NAND Flash for smartphones and PCs was the primary driver for production. Today, that dynamic has inverted. The voracious demand for HBM by hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon, has forced the three biggest memory manufacturers (Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology) to pivot their limited cleanroom space and capital expenditure towards higher margin enterprise-grade components. This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop.”
“If the smartphone market is facing pressure, the PC market is bracing for disruption. The timing of the memory shortage creates a perfect storm for the PC industry, colliding with the Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-life refresh cycle and the AI PC marketing push.
“PC vendors are signalling broad price increases as cost pressures intensify into H2 2026. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and ASUS have warned clients of tougher conditions ahead, confirming 15-20% hikes and contract resets as an industry-wide response.
“White box as well as lower tier (often local) vendors, on the other hand, will bear the greatest burden of the shortage, and that would include DIY systems, oftentimes built by gamers. That in turn represents an opportunity for large OEMs to gain share from smaller assemblers in the gaming space by positioning pre-built systems as offering higher value.”
Personally, I wouldn’t bet on this reverting even in 2027.
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