Samsung says the RAM crunch gets worse in 2027, not better

Samsung makes about a third of the world’s memory chips. Its own forecast for that market is the least reassuring thing you’ll read this quarter: the RAM shortage doesn’t ease next year, it gets worse in 2027, and tight supply runs until at least 2028.

That’s not an analyst guessing from the outside. That’s the supplier telling you it can’t catch up for three more years.

The AI labs are booking memory years in advance

On its Q2 earnings call, Samsung said frontier AI labs, desperate to obtain access to memory infrastructure, have been “sharing their medium- to long-term demand forecasts” directly with the company to secure future supply.

Read that again. Companies are handing a chipmaker their multi-year roadmaps just to get in line.

The practical effect is that Samsung gets to pick winners. Customers willing to sign long-term contracts move to the front, and that multi-year visibility lets the company install equipment and ramp production without worrying demand evaporates halfway through the build. It’s how Samsung avoids the memory industry‘s boom-and-bust cycle, which historically punished anyone who expanded capacity at the wrong moment.

Good for Samsung’s planning department. Bad for anyone buying a laptop.

Samsung is winning and losing at the same time

Higher chip prices cut both ways inside the same company. Sales at Samsung’s semiconductor unit hit an all-time high in Q2. Profitability in its smartphone and TV divisions shrank, because those divisions have to buy the expensive components too.

So Samsung did the obvious thing and raised prices on Galaxy smartphones and tablets to cover the cost. Demand for those devices then dropped.

That’s the whole loop, visible in one company’s quarterly results. The memory business subsidizes itself by taxing the consumer business, and the consumer business loses customers.

Apple already blinked

The shortage, informally dubbed “the RAMaggedon,” pushed Apple to raise prices on MacBooks, Macs and iPads last month. Apple doesn’t raise prices casually.

The guidance is the more telling number. On its latest earnings call, Apple said revenue growth for the upcoming quarter is projected to slow to between 9% and 11% year-over-year, down from a recent 16% quarterly growth rate.

A company that sells hardware at Apple’s margins telling investors growth is decelerating by roughly a third is a company absorbing a cost it can’t fully pass along.

What this actually costs you

Memory manufacturers are moving capacity toward AI data centers and away from consumer electronics. That’s the mechanism behind every price increase in this story.

Nvidia is expected to raise consumer graphics card prices by 20% to 30%. On a card that runs several hundred dollars, that’s not a rounding error you shrug off at checkout, and it doesn’t stop at GPUs. Gaming devices, desktops, consoles and laptops all sit downstream of the same components.

If you’ve been waiting for a price dip before upgrading a machine, the supplier responsible for a third of global memory just told you the dip isn’t coming before 2028. Buy the RAM configuration you’ll want in three years now, while the upcharge is merely annoying rather than structural.