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Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026

79 points speckx 1 hour ago 77 comments

spiclk 58 minutes ago | parent

If only we'd all made do with 640k!

otabdeveloper4 25 minutes ago | parent

This but unironically.

NikolaNovak 3 minutes ago | parent

This is why I (actually/literally) just purchased a Commodore 64; I miss the days of crazy optimization and hardware hacking to fit so much into so little :).

twelvedogs 57 minutes ago | parent

doesn't seem unlikely, i'd probably ask someone who won't massively benefit from people believing that it will be tighter though

Neil44 50 minutes ago | parent

Yeah he doesn't want people delaying purchasing decisions

embedding-shape 22 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, if anything, this makes it more clear to me that all this wonky supply/demand stuff will correct itself sooner rather than later. I've been wanting to upgrade my workstation but the DDR5 RDIMM sticks are unbelievably expensive, last few weeks I've almost pulled the trigger anyway, now I think I'll continue wait at least for the beginning of next year.

jasonjmcghee 7 minutes ago | parent

Exactly - this kind of borders on market influence.

Effectively: "Now's the time to invest..."

zsoltkacsandi 53 minutes ago | parent

No one will use AI products if there won't be consumer products because of RAM shortage.

snovv_crash 52 minutes ago | parent

Tragedy of the commons.

microtonal 36 minutes ago | parent

Neither consumer products nor RAM are really commons?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

fwip 34 minutes ago | parent

If anything, it's the tragedy of econ 101.

dannyw 51 minutes ago | parent

There’s always going to be consumer products, even if the value proposition is worse.

If there’s a silver lining, I hope it leads to more optimisation, less Electron, and less bloat.

Typed from my 8GB MacBook Neo; which is honestly plenty fast enough. It “feels” like a 16GB windows laptop, even tho of course I know it’s not, but there’s something about optimisation.

KingOfCoders 48 minutes ago | parent

And a 4gb Linux machine.

dgellow 46 minutes ago | parent

Lots of more niche products than Apple’s laptop won’t exist for a while due to the price of hardware. At a smaller scale the inflation hardware companies experience is really, really massive

pickleglitch 49 minutes ago | parent

The plan is to make us all use shitty hardware like a chromebook and rent compute from the cloud for anything heavier than a web browser.

cube00 36 minutes ago | parent

> anything heavier than a web browser

The way Chrome feasts on RAM, might need the cloud for that too.

KellyCriterion 23 minutes ago | parent

Honestly, FF became similar worse: On my 16 GB machine, when surfing some hours FF has allocated around 10-11 GB and for whatever reason it does not free them, unless I exit and restart it

amelius 48 minutes ago | parent

The AI companies will sell those products to us. Locked down and all.

infecto 46 minutes ago | parent

While I definitely agree that there will be a slow down in purchase decisions for both consumers and businesses I struggle with this idea that there will be “no consumer products” in the market. There will be.

zsoltkacsandi 34 minutes ago | parent

There will be, but the question who will be able to afford it.

It’s like saying that there is no housing crysis in several countries because the market is full of houses, apartments, etc.

infecto 33 minutes ago | parent

You’re making what seems like a zero sum assumption. I am still using my M1 MacBook for work. I have a first version Mac Studio at home and countless other devices laying around. The world will continue to move forward and yes purchasing will slow down but folks will still be using their existing phones, laptops and other devices.

the8472 45 minutes ago | parent

They can sell the AI products to write memory-optimized software to replace React apps.

water-drummer 52 minutes ago | parent

Shovel seller says shovels will be expensive in winter so make sure to buy as many as you can today.

dgellow 49 minutes ago | parent

I mean, yes, but they are also right. They benefit from the market conditions, and contribute to the price increase, but it’s pretty clear there won’t be that much available shovels for a very long time

cheschire 22 minutes ago | parent

Especially when the equipment the shovel seller uses to produce shovels has been retooled to produce backhoes instead because of a digging bubble.

MrGilbert 20 minutes ago | parent

Of course, because there was a HOA that became financially so big (on paper), that it secured 80% of the shovel supply for the next two years. Now everyone is fighting over the remaining 20%.

damowangcy 49 minutes ago | parent

remind me in a few years when the same CEO is writing long post on Linkedin explaining why they need to let go half of the company.

glimshe 42 minutes ago | parent

Don't be too hard on the CEO. It will be unavoidable and he will be deeply sorry and humbled by their dedication throughout the years. Also, people will receive 2 months of benefits and FREE job search consulting (through an AI agent).

KellyCriterion 25 minutes ago | parent

...and he will send many thanks for the great work all of you did throughout all the hard years!

benoau 22 minutes ago | parent

In the past, when you were family!

ijidak 13 minutes ago | parent

And it will be "the hardest thing he's ever done"

proxysna 48 minutes ago | parent

I have huge hopes fox CXMT entering the market and at least offsetting this nightmare. Just this week i've paid ~$1k USD for 2x32G DDR5 ECC, insane.

elorant 47 minutes ago | parent

They don't have the infrastructure to meet global demand.

bryanlarsen 30 minutes ago | parent

Yet. Maybe they will by 2028, making this prediction incorrect.

Grombobulous 21 minutes ago | parent

I would never bet against a Chinese company ramping up production quickly.

ngl999 7 minutes ago | parent

They'll probably join the party and hype about tight demand by that time.

vidarh 14 minutes ago | parent

They're 10% of the market now, and they've shown the ability to scale up manufacturing rapidly. They certainly won't singlehandedly meet demand, but they might at least be able to temper the price growth quite a bit.

aurareturn 5 minutes ago | parent

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is gated by ASML machines. They can't make nearly enough EUV machines to satisfy the demand. ASML has also not scaled their production nearly as much because they're quite far away from the AGI-pilled companies in the supply chain.

sidewndr46 48 minutes ago | parent

So instead of consumer's not being able to buy memory, consumers won't be able to buy memory?

theodric 46 minutes ago | parent

Man whose compensation package is strongly tied to the economic performance of his company says company's economic performance will be great in 2027 and 2028 (so people should invest now to benefit from that bump)

wewewedxfgdf 43 minutes ago | parent

Obviously, because they are making a killing.

postepowanieadm 41 minutes ago | parent

Micron may be out of business by then.

fwip 35 minutes ago | parent

How? They weren't doing poorly before 2026, and as far as I can tell, their profits have risen dramatically.

LunaSea 27 minutes ago | parent

What if Oracle, Anthropic and OpenAI can't pay their infrastructure bill?

Grombobulous 20 minutes ago | parent

Then memory goes back to pre-2026 pricing and memory is still profitable with a cartel market of less than 5 manufacturers.

yvdriess 4 minutes ago | parent

But only in 2028 because all the wafers rotting away in the warehouses are HBM which are too expensive to package or integrate into consumer electronics with tighter margins. Looking forward to having enthousiast-grade GPUs with HBM again though.

vidarh 25 minutes ago | parent

Micron reported full year revenue of $133bn, up 256%, $100bn of which was DRAM, with non-GAAP earnings last quarter of their financial year of $37.7bn on $54.23bn of revenue. Seems pretty healthy to me. Any reason to think they'll go out of business?

yipinwong 41 minutes ago | parent

In the short term, what `Neil44` mentioned "Yeah he doesn't want people delaying purchasing decisions" makes sense.

In the long term, the big comapnies are pushign to have consumers to adopt "terminals" back in old days.

- we use crappy devices, while cloud got beefy machines.

oidar 40 minutes ago | parent

There's a joke in here about an invisible hand, the two manufactures of ram doing something dirty in the dark, and the cost of a kidney.

PowerElectronix 39 minutes ago | parent

It'd be a shame if their two main sources of income (openai and anthropic) were to go bust...

MrGilbert 19 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think they will. There is too much money in it now.

mrweasel 8 minutes ago | parent

Only last year Microsoft admitted to having GPUs in inventory that they couldn't power, due to a lack of electricity. So much of this production capacity could very well go into making memory chips for GPUs sitting in a warehouse.

The amount of money spend on the AI hype train is crazy. Meanwhile we're wasting fab time making chips that might never be powered on. It's absolutely insane that there are more money to be made on hardware for AI that may never be used, rather than producing a product that consumers and businesses need right now.

gnfargbl 13 minutes ago | parent

Sure, and they'll be cognizant of that risk when considering expansion. The lessons of the dotcom fiber boom aren't that distant in memory.

api 33 minutes ago | parent

CXMT is coming for this market, and this creates a huge opening for it.

loopydosuette 32 minutes ago | parent

and here I hoped to suspect that my DRAM prices were all fake news run by my MITM ... goood, damn it

this would be the time to revive and evolve some of that Made In Germany Engineering ...

HPsquared 32 minutes ago | parent

I look forward to memory optimizations in software design.

ocd 22 minutes ago | parent

That's the one silver lining. I've always kept a lean desktop of mostly terminal based programs, and I've heard one too many times "just buy more RAM" as a defense for resource intensive graphical programs using Electron or modern browsers in general.

mertd 14 minutes ago | parent

You joke but I don't see why mass optimization shouldn't be possible given the cost of mass refactoring went to effectively zero at this point.

kilroy123 7 minutes ago | parent

This has absolutely been a dream of mine. We act like it's the 80s-90s again and optimize all the software.

brnaftr361 27 minutes ago | parent

Gonna be crazy to watch this bubble pop.

jmyeet 26 minutes ago | parent

One factor constraining supply for RAM in the short-to-medium term is that memory manufacturers is that DDR5 (and assumedly DDR6) capacity is being moved to the much more profitable HBM.

I think supply will be tight until at least the AI market crashes, which could take years or happen within months. Nobody can really predict when this will happen but it's fairly clear (IMHO) that the revenue projections needed to justify the investments by OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX simply don't exist.

Without the AI boom, the economy is in recession and has been for awhile. We're in an affordability crisis and the energy crunch is coming.

ocd 25 minutes ago | parent

I'm not a business guy, but I think I would be very worried if I created any opening (even on the very long term) for competition to justify itself being built up to meet demand (or national security requirements of other countries) on an industry I mostly control, because I prioritized extremely high prices for a few years that might have the effect of changing the arithmetic for potential competitors that wouldn't have done it before.

It makes me consider whether there would be retaliation in later years against the US intellectual property system in countries other than China. While RAM is a tangible product, the areas it serves aren't really.

pllbnk 15 minutes ago | parent

I think neither CEOs nor boards of the public companies care. They want to maximize their paychecks and bonuses in the short term before they leave to other companies.

__MatrixMan__ 14 minutes ago | parent

Like termites, moving on to the next tree. One day we'll figure out how to be rid of these parasites, then we'll have healthier trees.

ocd 13 minutes ago | parent

Point well taken. Same issue as with shareholders since it's not like companies really belong to a family anymore with a reputation on the line, like their name being in the company name.

pelotron 13 minutes ago | parent

Whether they did this or not, I think the exponential demand for memory would still be there. So there would still be conditions that encourage new competing manufacturers.

wewewedxfgdf 10 minutes ago | parent

There is 3 companies that make memory - they ALL want to keep memory prices high for as long as possible.

lotsofpulp 8 minutes ago | parent

I also like to keep prices high for as long as possible for the things I sell. I bet most people I ask would answer the same.

malfist 9 minutes ago | parent

The argument I've seen about why someone else doesn't start selling RAM is it takes a year or two to ramp production. But here's a CEO saying he's going to make sure prices stay high enough, long enough that you can spin up a competitor

ecshafer 9 minutes ago | parent

How much of this issue is self-inflicted? Micron is building a massive fab in Syracuse. They've spent like 4 years seeking approval, lobbying politicians, doing BS "environmental impact studies" (which are mostly just rent seeking and political handouts). They finally started building, but if they had just been able to put shovel in the ground we would already have this fab be producing memory.

jgalt212 8 minutes ago | parent

> because I prioritized extremely high prices for a few years that might have the effect of changing the arithmetic for potential competitors that wouldn't have done it before.

Or maybe they believe the demand is not sustainable, and they don't want to fund $10B ghost fabs.

sharts 24 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like the gov needs to spin up another “Project Warp Speed” like they did during covid.

baalimago 22 minutes ago | parent

I thought that the bulk of memory is already "technically bought" by the AI hyperscalers in the form of the big (not so) "hidden" debt? As in: the supply should already be known.

Why the need for speculation?

vidarh 18 minutes ago | parent

Micron reportedly sold $100bn worth of DRAM last financial year, and reportedly has $40bn long term commitments. $40bn is more than their entire fiscal 2025 revenue, so it's a lot, but it's clear it'll be a minority of their available supply.

shevy-java 13 minutes ago | parent

They are milking the market now.

Make no mistake here: they also plan to retain these high prices. It's like the mafia now. There should be instant-jail time to cure these CEOs of their greed. Like, go to prison for a week, to help refresh your mind and stop thinking in terms of milking the customers dry.