DRAM contract prices forecast to grow only 13-18% in Q3
- ID
- 22126
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 07 Sep 2026, 11:20 PM
- Fetched
- 08 Sep 2026, 1:06 AM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/storage/2026/09/07/dram-contract-prices-forecast-to-grow-only-13-18-in-q3/5294776
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 08 Sep 2026, 1:12 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
TrendForce forecasts DRAM contract prices to rise 13-18% QoQ in Q3, a moderation from the 59.5% QoQ jump that drove industry revenue to $154.73B in Q2. PC and smartphone buyers are hitting budget limits, shifting demand away from high-capacity RDIMMs toward lower-capacity products, while supplier inventories stay at historic lows and supplies remain tight. Context separately forecasts European laptop shipments to fall 6.4% YoY in Q3 and 20% in Q4, with desktops down ~20% and ~30% respectively, as corporate buyers extend refresh cycles.
Why it matters
If you're budgeting for cloud, on-prem servers, or AI/ML training hardware in the next two quarters, expect memory costs to keep climbing even if less explosively than Q2. Founders running memory-heavy workloads (LLM inference, vector DBs, caching layers) should model 13-18% sequential DRAM price increases into Q3/Q4 infrastructure projections rather than assuming relief, since inventories remain low and bit shipments are only growing modestly.
Discussion angle
How should Malaysian startups and indie builders factor persistent DRAM price pressure into their cloud vs on-prem decisions — especially for AI inference workloads where memory capacity is the main bottleneck?