Memory executives expect RAM shortage to continue through 2028

Micron and Samsung executives said this week that the memory shortage will continue for at least the next couple of years. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on the company's quarterly earnings call that demand for Micron's memory will exceed its available supply over that period.

Micron no longer sells RAM to consumers, so Mehrotra's comments refer to its business-to-business products: high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI and DRAM for servers. The effects reach consumer devices anyway, because manufacturing capacity is being prioritized for AI and server memory, limiting the memory produced for consumer hardware.

Supply and demand keep tightening

“Overall, supply-demand environment is only getting tighter,” Mehrotra said. Seventy-five percent of Micron's memory output for 2027 is already accounted for, and most of the company's current sales discussions concern 2028, he said. Demand for HBM is also outpacing demand for Micron's DRAM.

“For 2027, a large part of the volume is already sold out for 2027 for HBM, and the prices are much higher than 2026 prices,” he said.

New clean rooms won't fix the shortage quickly

Micron plans to open new clean rooms for memory manufacturing in 2028, but Mehrotra expects supply to remain limited even then. “Even after they are built, even after first wafer output, production ramps up only gradually in the clean rooms,” he said. He added that the shift from HBM 3E to a greater mix of 4 and 4E creates headwinds for supply growth, and that future node transitions will give less productivity gain per wafer.

Micron doesn't know when supply will catch up with demand. The drivers, Mehrotra said, are larger models, growing context, more concurrency and the spread of agents across enterprise and consumer use, all pushing demand for more memory, more memory capacity per system and higher-performance memory.

Consumers already feel the crunch

Micron's Crucial brand stopped selling RAM to consumers, a change announced in December 2025. Sumit Sadana, Micron EVP and chief business officer, said at the time that AI was driving data center memory demand and that the company wanted to improve “supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”

Samsung EVP Kim Taewoo said this week that HBM will account for almost 30 percent of DRAM manufacturers' wafer capacity in 2027, up from 20 percent this year, Reuters reported. That will further limit the DRAM made for consumer devices. The shortage has already raised prices for prebuilt PCs, where RAM now represents 35 percent of the bill of materials for HP machines, and pushed OEMs to sell lower-RAM configurations at higher prices. Prices for smartphones, streaming sticks and gaming consoles are up as well; Roku raised its streaming device prices by up to 60 percent.