TrendForce Sees 4Q26 DRAM Contract Prices Up 10-15% as Enterprise SSD Becomes Only Accelerating Category
TrendForce forecasts conventional DRAM contract prices rising 10-15% quarter on quarter and NAND Flash 15-20% in the fourth quarter of 2026, with enterprise SSD the only product line where price growth accelerates, while Taiwan's Nanya and Winbond post record revenue on supply that still covers only half of demand.
TrendForce's latest quarterly memory research shows suppliers continuing to allocate advanced-process capacity to high-performance server parts, leaving the overall DRAM market undersupplied even as the pace of increases moderates. Conventional DRAM contract prices are projected to rise 10-15% quarter on quarter in the fourth quarter, while NAND Flash contract prices are seen up 15-20%. The moderation reflects how much of the move was already priced into earlier quarters rather than any easing of physical tightness.
Server DRAM is expected to stay undersupplied. Improving server CPU availability has pushed cloud service providers and server OEMs to add bit procurement for the RDIMM volumes that general servers running agentic AI workloads require. Suppliers have raised the share of lower-capacity RDIMMs in their mix, but component availability, packaging and test capacity, and limited front-end production flexibility keep supply from matching demand, and some sellers remain capped by long-term agreement pricing mechanisms that leave their realised increases below the market average.
Enterprise SSD is the single category where price growth accelerates. TrendForce projects bit demand for enterprise SSDs to grow more than 80% year on year in 2026 as cloud providers expand AI inference infrastructure and demand shifts from model training toward deployment, with agentic AI driving exponential growth in real-time retrieval and caching data. QLC penetration in vector databases is rising and PCIe 6.0 adoption is ramping alongside next-generation AI server platforms, but most incremental supply has already been committed, leaving little available on the open market.
Supplier financials confirm the squeeze. Nanya Technology reported third-quarter revenue of NT$133.65 billion, up 61.9% quarter on quarter, with September revenue of NT$45.09 billion up 576.62% year on year; institutional investors raised their ASP growth forecast for the company from 32% to 50% and now expect another 10% quarter-on-quarter ASP increase in the fourth quarter. Nanya can meet only around 50-60% of customer demand, with long-term contracts covering more than 60% of supply. Winbond posted September revenue of NT$28.25 billion, up 256.67% year on year, with fourth-quarter memory prices seen rising a further 8-13%. Client SSD pricing is softer because PC brands are cutting mainstream capacities and buyers hold sufficient inventory.