TrendForce Sees 4Q26 DRAM Up 10-15% and NAND Up 15-20% as Enterprise SSD Accelerates

TrendForce's latest memory research expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 10-15% quarter on quarter in the fourth quarter of 2026 and overall NAND Flash contract prices to increase 15-20%, with the pace of increases moderating even as the market stays undersupplied. DRAM suppliers continue to prioritise advanced-process capacity for high-performance server products. Enterprise SSD is the only category where growth accelerates: bit demand is projected to rise more than 80% year on year in 2026 as cloud service providers expand AI inference infrastructure, demand shifts from training toward deployment, and agentic AI drives real-time retrieval and caching volumes.

The divergence between server and consumer is now the defining feature of the market. Server DRAM is expected to remain undersupplied through the quarter as improved CPU availability pushes CSPs and server OEMs to buy more bits for RDIMMs in general servers running agentic AI workloads; component supply, packaging and test capacity, and front-end process flexibility all prevent supply from matching the requested mix, and some suppliers' realised increases will lag the average because of long-term agreement pricing mechanisms. On the consumer side, notebook inventories increasingly reflect higher component costs, smartphone builds keep shrinking as low-cost inventory is exhausted, and PC brands are cutting SSD capacities in mainstream models to hold bill-of-materials costs down.

NAND pricing is being pulled in two directions at once. Client SSD buyers are leaning on finished-goods and channel stock built in the first half, which lets suppliers take a more flexible stance and caps the size of increases, while NAND wafer prices have reached historical highs that retail channels struggle to absorb, pushing module makers into cautious procurement. For eMMC and UFS, smartphone brands are mostly running on existing inventory and ordering only the minimum volumes needed to keep supplier relationships intact. Graphics DRAM is still rising: suppliers keep cutting GDDR6 output and GDDR7 remains capacity-constrained as advanced process capacity shifts to server DRAM.

On the technology front, Chinese memory maker CXMT used the October 10 Integrated Circuits and Chiplet Conference to introduce its 4F2 DRAM architecture, with president Cao Kanyu flagging next-generation DDR5 RDIMMs based on the technology by year-end. 4F2 shrinks the cell footprint from six to four times the square of the minimum feature size, potentially lifting density 30-50% in the same area, and relies on a Vertical Surrounded Gate transistor. CXMT ranked fourth in global DRAM revenue in 2Q26 with 9.5% share, up from 7.6%, behind Samsung at 39.4%, SK hynix at 24.9% and Micron at 23.3%. Samsung has shown a 16Gb 4F2 prototype with wafer-to-wafer hybrid bonding but is not expected to commercialise before 2028, and reports suggest CXMT's first parts may only partially adopt 4F2.