"When I asked him how bad things really were, Clarke looked at me with a sigh. "Look, I've been at this a long time. This is the worst shortage I've ever seen. Demand is way ahead of supply. And it's driven by AI. It's driven by infrastructure. You've seen the spot market price-it's up to five times from September. That will manifest. It already has in contract pricing.""
""While the average person can buy straight from a retailer, laptop manufacturers have to negotiate contracts on DRAM. According to an analyst from Citrini Research, prices on DRAM increased by around 40 percent in the final quarter of 2025. It's not slowing down; it's escalating. Prices will be up to 60 percent higher in the first quarter of this year. From everyone I talked to this week, I got the impression that the memory shortage would last not months but years.""
AI-driven demand and infrastructure investment have produced the worst memory shortage on record, with demand far outstripping supply and spot prices surging up to fivefold since September. Contract DRAM pricing has already reflected those spot-market increases. Retail consumers can still buy devices, but laptop manufacturers must secure DRAM through contracts and faced roughly 40 percent DRAM price increases in late 2025, with forecasts of up to 60 percent higher pricing in early 2026. The shortage is expected to persist for years. Hardware-side alternatives aim to reduce cloud-dependent AI workloads, including SSD caching to expand local GPU memory bandwidth.
Read at WIRED
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