DRAM Contracts Seen Up 10-15% in 4Q26 as NAND Rises 15-20% and Custom HBM Reshapes Supply

TrendForce's latest memory research says DRAM suppliers continue to prioritise advanced-process capacity for high-performance server products, keeping the overall market undersupplied even as the pace of increases moderates. Conventional DRAM contract prices are projected to rise 10-15% quarter on quarter in 4Q26, while overall NAND Flash contract prices are seen up 15-20%. Enterprise SSDs are the only category expected to see growth accelerate, with bit demand projected to rise more than 80% year on year in 2026 as cloud service providers expand AI inference infrastructure and agentic AI workloads drive exponential growth in real-time retrieval and caching data. Most incremental supply has already been committed, leaving little available on the open market.

On the DRAM side, server memory remains the tightest segment as improving CPU availability lets cloud providers and server OEMs increase bit procurement for RDIMMs used in general servers supporting agentic AI. Suppliers have raised the share of lower-capacity RDIMMs in their product mix, but component supply, packaging and test capacity and front-end DRAM production flexibility still prevent supply from matching demand, and some sellers' increases lag the market average because of pricing bands written into long-term agreements. PC DRAM procurement stays aggressive because OEMs expect supply to remain tight in 2027, mobile DRAM price growth is moderating after large earlier increases, and graphics DRAM stays on an upward path as suppliers cut GDDR6 output while GDDR7 remains capacity-constrained.

Custom HBM is redrawing the supply chain. NVIDIA's NVHBM, announced in August, moves the memory controller onto the HBM base die and delivers up to 30% higher memory bandwidth and 15% lower HBM power consumption than standard HBM4E, while freeing up to 25% more area on the XPU compute die. Micron says both its co-designed NVHBM and JEDEC-standard HBM4E will use base dies from an external foundry, with HBM4E core dies moving to its 1-gamma process, and COO Manish Bhatia expects NVHBM to command a higher average selling price and stronger margins. Samsung is pursuing a dual-track approach, pairing its HBM core dies with base dies from either Samsung Foundry or TSMC depending on customer requirements, while SK hynix already uses TSMC's 12nm logic process for its HBM4 base die with 3nm prioritised for HBM4E and future custom parts.

The implication for pricing is that the tightness is structural rather than cyclical. Roughly half of the leading-edge DRAM capacity at the three major suppliers is being steered toward HBM and server parts, which squeezes conventional DDR5 availability even as PC and handset buyers cut configurations to defend bill-of-materials cost. With HBM demand growth expected to outpace conventional DRAM through 2028 and new cleanroom capacity not opening until late in the decade, suppliers see no near-term point at which supply and demand rebalance.