The CEO of chip giant Micron, Sanjay Mehrotra, has said that the AI-fueled global RAM and NAND shortage will continue through 2027 and “improve gradually” the following year.
Speaking to investors in the company’s Q3 earnings call for its 2026 financial year, the chief executive went on to admit that while the situation is going to improve in 2028, the firm still has no visibility on when “memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand”.
This points to a massive chip backlog for years to come, with future supply contingent on expansions in greenfield fab locations, aka chip factories built on undeveloped land.
Mehrotra also said that the long periods it takes to build fabs, as well as a shortage of relevant workers and regulations, are slowing down the pace.
For the three months ending May 28, 2026, Micron reported $41.46 billion in revenue, a massive 346% increase year-on-year, while its profit for the quarter rose by 1,398%, almost 15 times.
While Micron is making huge sums of money selling pickaxes in the AI goldrush, the supply shortage is having serious impacts on the global hardware markets.
Earlier this year, GamesIndustry.biz spoke to analysts and industry experts on the subject. The situation was created, in part, by the decision of the big chip firms – Micron, Samsung and Hynix – signing massive contracts to furnish the increasing number of data centres to power the AI boom.
The result is colossal price increases in DDR5 RAM and NAND, which is used to make SSDs.
Games platform holders have increased the cost of their consoles as the amount needed to buy components has risen. Most recently, Valve revealed that its Steam Machine mini-PC was going to start at $1,049 – much higher than the company would have liked.
“The companies that manufacture the necessary components have fully shifted toward selling to hyperscalers, paying a premium to build out their data centres,” Aldora CEO Joost van Dreunen told GI following the Steam Machine price reveal.
“The memory makers – Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron – are now ‘post-consumer’, which tells you gamers matter less and prices go up.”
