Your next phone or laptop just got a five-year price hike baked in—because the memory giants would rather chase AI gold than keep everyday DRAM on the shelf.
SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won says the memory chip shortage will persist until around 2030. Wafer supply is already trailing demand by more than 20 percent, and semiconductors don’t appear out of thin air.
Chey Tae-won said:
“Securing additional wafers takes at least four to five years.”
Translation: the assembly line you need today won’t be ready before the 2028 Olympics, let alone the next iPhone refresh.
SK Hynix currently controls 57 percent of global HBM and 32 percent of conventional DRAM. The company is pouring $13 billion into a new HBM facility in Cheongju, but that line won’t finish until 2027.
Samsung’s planned P5 DRAM expansion in Pyeongtaek and Micron’s $9.6 billion HBM plant in Hiroshima won’t ship a single wafer before 2028. Every one of those projects targets high-bandwidth memory—the stuff that feeds AI hardware, not the DDR5 modules that sit in your desktop.
Gartner expects the knock-on effect to hammer consumers straight through 2026: PC shipments down 10.4 percent, smartphone shipments down 8.4 percent, and DRAM plus SSD prices up 130 percent.
Consumer PC prices are projected to rise 17 percent year-over-year, stretching replacement cycles by 15–20 percent. In short, fewer gadgets, higher tags, and a longer wait before that “budget” upgrade.
The numbers already tell the story. A 20 percent wafer shortfall plus a 130 percent price spike equals a market that has quietly written off bargain buyers for the rest of the decade. If you planned to ride out today’s prices until the next dip, the fabs under construction say you’ll be waiting until the early 2030s.
Your only real move? Buy the RAM, SSD, or system you need now, before the next contract price sheet lands. After that, the cost curve points only one way—up—and the calendar the memory makers just published doesn’t leave much room for negotiation.
Source: Tomshardware