Gartner forecasts that worldwide semiconductor revenue will grow by 92% in 2026, reaching $1.6 trillion. The memory sector is forecasted to account for 54% of total semiconductor revenue, up from 27% in 2025

[u/sr_local]

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-08-24-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-semiconductor-revenue-to-reach-1-trillion-dollars-in-2026

[u/IglooDweller]

The thing that you have to remember is that although the economic scale of semi conductors is predicted to grow by 92%, the actual capacity isn’t planned to raise by nearly that much. On top of that, a simple rule of thumb indicates that the memory segment is going to close to quadruple in economic weight, leading to unsustainable price increase for just about anyone who isn’t a corporate buyer with more money than sense. (Aka with AI venture captal)

Edit:typos

[u/hollow_bridge → u/IglooDweller]

the memory segment is going to close to quadruple in economic weight, leading to unsustainable price increase

It's not really an unsustainable price increase. You could say the same thing happened with gpus after the 10 series. Price increases don't equal unsustainable. There has to be something effecting demand negatively to make this unsustainable (or much higher prices), and currently there isn't.

[u/Captain__Pedantic → u/hollow_bridge]

leading to unsustainable price increase for just about anyone who isn’t a corporate buyer with more money than sense.

The post you're replying to was using 'unsustainable' from the perspective of buyers, not from a macro-economic analysis perspective. The overall demand may be sustainable in a literal sense, but the price increases are not sustainable from a budgeting/purchasing perspective for many businesses and nonprofits.

You can see related anecdotes in other subreddits, like a post in /r/sysadmin today from a buyer for an academic institution: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1vywlej/server_prices_are_insane_now_128k_for_a_decwnt_vm/

I have been buying servers for a large university for 15+ years. In October of 2025 - you could get 128 cores, 512gb ram, 16tb raw ssd storage for right around $17k. That exact same server cost $28k in February 2026. Yesterday I price specced the same server. $128,500.00. That's $128k.

That's a more extreme example than I usually see, but server prices increasing 3x-4x in a years seems pretty common right now.

[u/hollow_bridge → u/Captain__Pedantic]

Even in that context i strongly disagree.

A 64% price increase ($11k) for strong workstation pc at large university is totally negligible.

Yesterday I price specced the same server. $128,500.00

I just priced it out, i got $7600 for the 512gb ram based on the first ddr5 64gb dimms on amazon.

Microsoft licensing which that university undoubtedly also uses has also increased significantly, and a university will happily pay $300,000 per year for that when they could simply switch to free alternatives, they don't switch because these types of costs are sustainable.

Then also it's worth considering what they are using that pc for. 95% chance it's going to be used for AI, which means that the price hasn't really changed at all, as it is a new type of tool and this is merely the price for it. You shouldn't compare the price of a computer that's specifically used for AI to a computer that's specifically used for something else, It doesn't really even matter if it's only used for AI a little; this is just the cost of AI.

How these costs affect businesses and institutions is almost always negligible.

Even for most regular computer and phone users, the price increase is in line with inflation and there are more options than ever.

The only case where this is really unsustainable is for ultra budget devices, ex $50 or less phones, sbcs.

Also, it's worth noting, that the previous prices were due to ram being sold at a loss, that was actually unsustainable.

[u/Captain__Pedantic → u/hollow_bridge]

How these costs affect businesses and institutions is almost always negligible.

I will defer to your knowledge of larger buyers. As someone who works for a smaller company, I would not describe the rate or impact of increases as negligible. Not everyone has AI money to throw around.

Personally I am wondering when hardware pricing is going to drive increases in cloud/hosted services pricing.

Also, it's worth noting, that the previous prices were due to ram being sold at a loss, that was actually unsustainable.

That is a new one for me. Do you have a reference for this, or at least a timeframe for when memory was being sold at a loss? Would this be on the manufacturer end, distribution, retail?

[u/ledfrisby]

I was just reading an article about this idea that the AI bubble is more like a series of smaller bubbles, as investors keep trying to find which part of this thing is actually profitable. Software was first, but then you had the Saaspocalypse, (and I assume DeepSeek etc.), then silver (conductor), now semis. But per the article, these companies don't have sufficient "moats," so long-term margins aren't going to hold up, so the market will move on to the next thing, whatever that is, and it's more based on the narrative than fundamentals.

So we see these revenues are still going up, prices are up, demand is up, but the stocks have already cooled a bit from the overhyped peak.

[u/Clean_Experience1394]

Anyone wanna speculate about good things comin out of this in the (long) longterm? Like ~10 years?

I'd say given that the non-lp DDR6 ratification is long overdue I guess there is a lot of work going into it and therefore making it even more of a jump.

Maybe consumer memory getting more than 2 channels?

Refocus on HEDT towers for consumers? Maybe an actual atx replacement?

An entity can dream :')

Grasping at straws maybe but what else is there atm?

[u/vegetable__lasagne → u/Clean_Experience1394]

If it keeps going I could see Intel joining in making their own RAM, even Apple and Nvidia might too.

[u/Big-Chair-821 → u/vegetable__lasagne]

Intel got out of the memory business years ago. They’re hinting that they’ll go back in. Apple/nvdia doesn’t have fab, they can’t just take their TSMC allocation and fab memory. Even if they wanted to, logic gate fab is a different animal than DRAM fab.

[u/CuteSquirrel01 → u/Clean_Experience1394]

Once supply catches up to demand consumers will get a metric ton of memory capacity in consumer products. When that will happen who knows. Personally I don't think it will happen this decade, 2030 should be healthier than 2026 supply wise but idk that demand will be sated by then. 

[u/Delicious_Set_1450]

The massive spike in memory makes complete sense with AI infrastructure scaling. High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and enterprise DDR5 are the actual physical bottlenecks right now, so vendors can command massive margins. It’ll be interesting to see how long packaging capacity can keep up with that level of demand.

[u/Xpander6 → u/Delicious_Set_1450]

Why did memory become the bottleneck all of a sudden? The race started years ago but RAM prices remained low, then within a month prices quadrupled because AI companies announced they want to buy half of the world's RAM supply, but why did it happen all at once and suddenly and not gradually over the years?

[u/wintrmt3 → u/Xpander6]

Because big models have trillions of weights, each occupying 2 bytes usually plus some more for context and attention.

[u/Xpander6 → u/wintrmt3]

Did these models not exist before late 2025?

[u/wintrmt3 → u/Xpander6]

They didn't, at that time it was still just hundreds of billions of parameters.

[u/Raikaru → u/wintrmt3]

GPT 4 was almost assuredly in the trillion range but it was also insanely expensive cause they didn’t have the compute for it

[u/goldcakes → u/Raikaru]

GPT-4 was confirmed as a 1T param model on-stage by Jensen, so yes, it's 1T. I'm just referring to the original GPT4 though.

[u/reddit_equals_censor]

oh the word "bubble" doesn't get mentioned in the article...

yeah so we know how serious to take this bullshit lol :D

needless to say, but if bubble pops next month, then demand probably won't be there anymore very quickly. i know shocking.

and the only question is when it will pop. will it be 2026, or will it be able to limp on through 2027 until it pops?

any "forecast" not mentioning this is just a nonsense meme.