Micron and Samsung executives said this week that memory shortages will continue for at least the next few years.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra expects demand for the company’s memory to exceed its available supply during that period, he told investors last night.
Micron no longer sells consumer RAM, and Mehrotra’s statements refer to business-to-business sales of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI and DRAM for servers. However, his comments also have implications for consumer devices. Manufacturing capacity is prioritizing memory for AI and servers, limiting the supply of manufactured memory for consumer devices.
“Overall, the supply and demand environment is becoming increasingly tight,” Mehrotra said, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha.
Micron plans to open new clean rooms for memory manufacturing in 2028, but Mehrotra expects supply to remain limited.
“Even after its construction, even after the first production of wafers, production increases only gradually in the clean rooms,” he said. “That is precisely the nature of what is needed to increase production, and with HBM moving from 3E to a larger mix of 4 and 4E, and with the commercial relationship that exists, that… creates headwinds with respect to supply growth. Future node transitions will also give less productivity gain per wafer.”
Seventy-five percent of Micron’s 2027 memory production is already accounted for, and most of the company’s current memory sales discussions revolve around 2028, the CEO said. Additionally, HBM demand is outpacing Micron DRAM demand.
