The surge in artificial intelligence spending is setting the memory industry on a new note.
shares of micron That’s an increase of over 370% over the past year. sandiskwhich was only listed in February last year, has risen more than 1,100%.
Memory stocks have been stuck in a boom-and-bust trader’s game for decades, but executives now say they see no signs of AI breaking structurally old cycles and causing prices to fall.
“As the industry continues to raise prices, we continue to raise prices.” HPE CEO Antonio Neri told CNBC. “Supply is not enough to meet demand.”
HDD manufacturer executive seagate He told the South China Morning Post on Tuesday that memory price increases are likely to become the “new normal” in the coming years.
Korean SK HynixThe company, one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers, told CNBC that the entire memory industry is undergoing structural change.
“Our customers, including hyperscalers, are increasingly preferring long-term contracts to the one-year contracts that were more common in the past,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Micron told CNBC that customers are now actively signing long-term supply contracts to lock in memory for years.
broadcom Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan said at an earnings conference last week that supply is secured until 2028.
Today’s AI workloads require architectures that are fundamentally different and far more memory intensive than the architectures the industry was built to support in the past.
meta announced a new in-house AI chip on Wednesday, and also raised concerns about access to the high-bandwidth memory needed.
“We are absolutely concerned about HBM’s supply,” Meta’s vice president of engineering Yi Ji-eun Song told CNBC. “But we believe we have secured supply for what we plan to build.”
With hyperscalers crowding out supplies to consumers and no meaningful relief available until 2027 at the earliest, AI enhancements may usher memory into a new era.
