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AI Chips & Compute

Micron DRAM Prices Jump Over 60% as AI Tightens Memory Supply

Micron DRAM prices rose over 60% in fiscal Q3 while bit shipments barely grew, a sign SiliconANGLE says points to AI supply scarcity.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-24 04:22

In its fiscal fourth quarter, Micron reported price growth moderating to the high teens in percentage terms while bit growth remained in the mid-single digits, according to the analysis. Because average selling prices are a blended figure, product mix remains a key determinant of revenue and margin.

Writing in Breaking Analysis 322, the outlet said it set out to test whether the current undersupply is temporary or represents a structural change in memory economics, and concluded that both forces are at work. Low shipment growth does not indicate weak demand while supply is constrained, the analysis said. The open question is how much of the pricing benefit persists as production expands and customers adjust to higher costs.

The analysis cited a webcast with Micron President and Chief Technology and Products Officer Scott DeBoer, whose roadmap emphasized memory's role in determining AI system performance. Micron has also introduced take-or-pay customer agreements that change how risk is shared between the company and its buyers, according to the report.

Memory suppliers including Micron, SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. are becoming more strategic to system designers as memory increasingly determines whether expensive AI processors stay productive, the analysis said. It added that the report examines how fabless designers, integrated device manufacturers, hyperscaler custom-silicon teams and design-verification engineers are managing high-bandwidth memory and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, or CoWoS, supply constraints, and how price increases are changing end customers' buying patterns.

Robert Castellano, writing in his newsletter, described the divergence between memory average selling prices and bit volume growth as a defining feature of the current semiconductor market, the analysis noted. Historically the two metrics moved together, with pricing shifts reflecting proportional changes in unit demand. The present gap instead points to structural tightening on the supply side and an aggressive shift toward specialized AI hardware, according to the report.

SiliconANGLE said its earlier forecast of a $1 trillion silicon business arrived two years ahead of schedule because the bottleneck had moved from graphics processing units to memory. High prices encourage more investment but also give customers a stronger reason to defer spending or redesign architectures, the analysis said, leaving unresolved how much pricing power and profitability endure once supply loosens.