The memory shortage is not ending any time soon — and one of the world’s biggest memory makers is now saying so on the record. On Micron’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call, CEO and chair Sanjay Mehrotra warned that memory and storage supply-demand conditions will be “much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026,” and that even with new capacity plans, Micron does “not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”
The call came as Micron posted record quarterly revenue of $54.2 billion, with more than 75% of its 2027 output already committed to customers. As Eurogamer reports, the CEO suggested customers should brace for prices well above what they paid in 2026.
Why Your RAM Keeps Getting More Expensive
The short version: AI is eating the supply. Most of the industry’s capacity is booked for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that AI datacentres need, leaving the big three memory manufacturers — a group that includes Samsung — with very little dedicated to consumer-grade memory. That has pushed consumer DRAM prices up by a high-teens percentage in the last quarter alone, with NAND prices up about 30%, and it has raised the cost of practically every device that uses these chips — game consoles very much included. Sony, for its part, is already fighting PS5 Pro scalpers with a playtime lottery in Japan as DRAM supplies tighten.
The AI Boom Behind the Warning
Micron’s numbers explain why the company isn’t rushing to fix it. HBM is growing in demand faster than the server DRAM used in datacentres, and it’s where the money is: Micron’s cloud memory unit posted an 83% gross margin last quarter, up from 59% a year earlier, while its core datacenter DRAM business hit 90%, up from 41%. Datacenter SSD sales came close to $10 billion for the quarter — more than 1,000% higher year-on-year — and Micron is working with Nvidia on NV-HBM, billed as the industry’s first custom HBM4E implementation for next-generation GPUs.
Relief is a long way off even with new fabs on the drawing board, as Micron’s Idaho ID2 fab isn’t expected to start wafer output until late 2028. Samsung, meanwhile, has also said it expects the component shortage to keep getting worse into next year. For gamers planning a PC build or a console purchase, the message is blunt: memory and storage prices are likely to stay elevated through 2027 — and quite possibly beyond.