TrendForce Sees 4Q26 DRAM Up 10-15% and Enterprise SSD Up 23-28% as AI Absorbs Supply

TrendForce's latest quarterly memory price forecast keeps the contract price rally intact into the fourth quarter of 2026, though at a slower pace than the third quarter. Conventional DRAM contract prices are projected to rise 10-15% quarter-on-quarter, down from 13-18% in 3Q26, while overall NAND Flash is seen up 15-20% against 18-23% previously. The deceleration reflects an increasingly high base rather than any easing of supply: DRAM suppliers continue to allocate advanced-process capacity to high-performance server products, leaving the overall market undersupplied.

Enterprise storage is the clear outlier. TrendForce expects enterprise SSD contract prices to jump 23-28% quarter-on-quarter, the only major category where the rate of increase accelerates, as North American cloud providers place urgent incremental orders for AI inference infrastructure. Enterprise SSD bit demand is forecast to grow more than 80% year-on-year in 2026, with demand shifting from large-model training toward deployment and agentic workloads that generate exponential volumes of real-time retrieval and caching data. Suppliers are expanding QLC capacity and high-capacity product availability and PCIe 6.0 adoption is ramping alongside next-generation AI server platforms, but most incremental supply has already been committed.

The rest of the complex is being rationed by allocation. Server DRAM remains undersupplied as improving CPU availability lets cloud providers and server OEMs raise bit purchases for RDIMMs, but constraints in component supply, packaging and test capacity and front-end production flexibility prevent supply from matching demand, and long-term agreement pricing mechanisms are capping increases for some sellers below the market average. PC DRAM buyers are still procuring aggressively on expectations of tight 2027 supply even as notebook inventories begin reflecting higher component costs, and TrendForce warns PC DRAM supply could actually shrink in 2027 as more capacity shifts to server applications. Mobile DRAM gains are moderating as rising costs and exhausted low-cost inventories suppress smartphone build, while graphics DRAM stays on an upward path as suppliers scale back GDDR6 and GDDR7 output stays limited.

Downstream, the shortage is now changing product design. TrendForce reported that Tesla has halved the LPDDR5 capacity of its AI5 chip to 72GB and cut the LPDDR6 specification of AI6 by roughly one-third in order to secure enough supply for large-scale Optimus production while containing cost. On the spot market, TrendForce's daily assessment showed DDR5 16Gb 4800/5600 averaging $58.00 and DDR4 16Gb 3200 at $83.59, levels that keep secondary-market supply tight and are pushing vendors toward long-term agreements for visibility.