Samsung Co-CEO TM Roh warned Monday that a shortage in computer memory, an essential component of technology hardware, is “unprecedented” and that “no company is immune to its impact.”
In an interview with Reuters, one chief of South Korea’s most valuable technology firm said that the impending impacts of this shortage on the consumer hardware industry were “inevitable,” and would likely lead to higher prices for TVs, home appliances, and smartphones.
As the name implies, memory is the place where hardware technology stores data or information. Memory traditionally comes in one of two flavors. The first is volatile memory (usually DRAM), a short-term location for information to be stored to for quick access by a computer’s brains. There’s also non-volatile memory (commonly, NAND flash, which is used in Solid State Drives (SSDs)), which offers more long-term storage.
The going price of memory has been distorted by seismic demand from hyperscalers—firms like Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, and others—that are spending billions to stand up data centers for the AI age. These enterprising firms are shaking up the entire semiconductor industry using their massive cash reserves.
Despite the direness of the shortage, global memory producers have shifted their production toward building high-performance computing (HPC) equipment. The DRAM market is dominated by Samsung, as well as competitors SK Hynix and Micron. In a sign of the times, the latter announced in December that it would shut down its consumer business to meet the demand of the chip-hungry AI industry.
This drew the ire of the PC computing business, which has faced skyrocketing prices. It’s not just high-bandwidth memory, which is optimal for data centers. The price of most current-generation DDR5 RAM has more than doubled; even last-gen DDR4 RAM has taken a similar trajectory. And the DRAM market has not been singular in its recent explosion in prices.
Flash storage has also become a hot-button issue. The CEO of Phison, which provides equipment for SSD drives, stressed that price increases on NAND flash would be rising by “up to 50, 75%” as hyperscalers throw elbows in the tightening market. The shares of storage makers like Western Digital and Seagate were among the best-performing equities in the U.S.’s S&P 500 index in 2025.
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The announcement has bolstered the stock market benchmarks in South Korea and Taiwan, the economies of which both rely heavily on the development of sophisticated computing equipment. This morning, Taiwan and Korea’s benchmark stock indexes hit record highs, rising on optimism that the shortage will be positive for mainstays like TSMC, Samsung, SK Hynix, and others.
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