--- title: RAM Companies Have Already Sold Through Their Entire... description: All three major memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have reportedly sold through their entire 2027 DRAM and HBM manufacturing capacity to AI... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: RAM Companies Have Already Sold Through Their Entire 2027 Manufacturing Capacity | daily.dev og:description: All three major memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have reportedly sold through their entire 2027 DRAM and HBM manufacturing capacity to AI... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/J77NiNMt4.png og:image:alt: RAM Companies Have Already Sold Through Their Entire 2027 Manufacturing Capacity og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # RAM Companies Have Already Sold Through Their Entire 2027 Manufacturing Capacity **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary All three major memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have reportedly sold through their entire 2027 DRAM and HBM manufacturing capacity to AI companies, with no further supply planned. Long-term purchasing agreements spanning five years are locking up supply before it's even produced. NAND storage is also seeing rising demand and prices, with a standard 1TB PCIe 4 SSD rising 52% in price over roughly six months. The ongoing RAM crisis is already affecting consumer hardware pricing, including the Xbox Series X and the Steam Machine launch price. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why is RAM so expensive right now and will prices go down soon? RAM prices are high because Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have reportedly sold their entire 2027 DRAM and HBM manufacturing capacity to AI companies through long-term five-year purchasing agreements. With no remaining supply planned and NAND storage demand also rising, consumer prices are expected to keep climbing. A standard 1TB PCIe 4 SSD has already risen 52% in roughly six months. _PC builders tracking component prices watch developments like this on daily.dev before committing to a build._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 165 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-09). **TL;DR:** The community is largely critical and concerned: AI companies locking up memory supply through 2027 is seen as destructive to consumer hardware markets and potentially unsustainable, though some debate whether the AI bubble will actually pop and how severe the downstream effects will be. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 40% mixed · 45% skeptical **The case for** - Long-term purchase agreements reduce risk for memory manufacturers who were previously reluctant to expand capacity. - Some argue the actual per-consumer cost impact is modest given how infrequently most people buy new hardware. - AI progress has been accelerating, which some see as justifying the massive infrastructure investment. **The pushback** - Locking up global memory supply through 2027 is already driving up prices for consumer DDR4, DDR5, and SSDs, harming ordinary buyers and poor countries disproportionately. - Memory manufacturers face a lose-lose scenario: if AI companies can't pay, manufacturers are stuck with undeliverable contracts, raising 2008-style default risk. - The circular financing behind AI datacenter buildouts means demand may be backed by debt rather than real revenue, making the supply crunch potentially artificial. - DDR4 prices rising as a substitute effect means even budget and legacy builds are now expensive, reversing ~15 years of price progress. - Regulatory frameworks don't exist to prevent a single sector from monopolizing a critical component supply chain. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters are broadly critical of AI companies monopolizing memory supply, worried about consumer price inflation, default risk, and the sustainability of AI financing, with a lively side debate about whether the bubble will pop and how bad the fallout will be. **Hottest debate:** Whether the AI industry's demand for memory is backed by real, sustainable revenue or is a debt-fueled bubble that will eventually collapse and leave memory manufacturers holding the bag. **Open questions** - Will memory manufacturers be able to collect payment if AI companies face a financing crunch before 2027 deliveries? - Could regulatory intervention — such as capping the share of memory supply sold to any single sector — be justified given memory's role as a critical upstream input? - Will Chinese manufacturers like CXMT be able to fill the gap for consumer-grade DRAM, and will export controls be relaxed to allow it? - How much of the consumer price increase is demand-driven versus manufacturers opportunistically raising DDR4 prices as a substitute effect? **Highlights** > > I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments. I don’t think most people are saying it is purely a scam (well, some do but I don’t think they are to be taken seriously). What all these talks about circular financing and VC money are saying is that demand cannot sustain the sector long-term, not that there is no demand. People are certainly happy to pay say $20/month for whatever AI chatbot, but would they still pay if it were $200/month, which is closer to the actual costs. There are several other details that point towards a unsustainable projections: - measurable benefits from AI-ifying companies are nowhere near what is commonly believed. AI providers are hoping that they can keep the show going until the models are good enough, essentially faking it until they’ve made it, but that is not a given. It is also unstable because it is susceptible to change in public opinion. - permits for new datacenters are not going to become easier to get as public opinion keeps turning against them. They will have to concentrate in friendly regions, which will add cost (more demand for the same location, plus interconnection for network and electricity, both of which can easily become bottlenecks). - the electric grids are not ready for all those planned datacenters, so something will have to give. Building more and more on-site diesel generator in times where oil supply is so constrained and random is not very sustainable either. - eventually the loans will come due and if earnings do not match there will be a, possibly severe, correction. If we look at the historical example of the dot-com bubble, the crash was not caused by no demand. It was just caused by over-estimated demand and too much money going to a single sector of the economy. We still use the Internet, and it is still hugely important, but the correction was still severe and real people lost real money. > — [kergonath on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208272) > At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taking delivery and paying for it is still in the future and the sums of capital involved are extremely large. > — [pjc50 on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207868) > Indeed. There's a reason the US government has historically stopped air traffic / railroad / longshore strikes: cascading effects. If memory is now upstream of so many companies, then maybe a higher regulatory involvement would be appropriate (like power companies). Specifically, and it could fix all of this, capping the max % of their supply they're allowed to sell into the AI space. > — [ethbr1 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208595) > The fact that consumer-level DDR4 is getting more expensive makes absolutely no market sense to me. > — [gaigalas on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208042) > According to your link, DDR5 today has the same price in real US $ as DDR3 was in 2014, during a brief spike towards high prices. Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today. To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011. So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress. > — [adrian\_b on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208696) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207236) · 176 points · 165 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's reasons why](https://daily.dev/posts/dram-prices-are-spiking-but-i-don-t-trust-the-industry-s-reasons-why-iyspia9av) · Hacker News · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Smartphone prices set to jump as memory crunch hits consumer tech](https://daily.dev/posts/smartphone-prices-set-to-jump-as-memory-crunch-hits-consumer-tech-sisft6sla) · TechCentral · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Hold on to Your Hardware](https://daily.dev/posts/hold-on-to-your-hardware-9nqouzuov) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#hardware](https://daily.dev/tags/hardware), [#ai-infrastructure](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-infrastructure) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"RAM Companies Have Already Sold Through Their Entire 2027 Manufacturing Capacity","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4"},"datePublished":"2026-08-07T09:50:31.130Z","dateModified":"2026-08-09T23:11:04.354Z","description":"All three major memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have reportedly sold through their entire 2027 DRAM and HBM manufacturing capacity to AI...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/2d0a87c0178d2953551fd0fcdeda7eaa?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/2d0a87c0178d2953551fd0fcdeda7eaa?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"hardware,ai-infrastructure","timeRequired":"PT3M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"RAM Companies Have Already Sold Through Their Entire 2027 Manufacturing Capacity"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ram-companies-have-already-sold-through-their-entire-2027-manufacturing-capacity-j77ninmt4#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"Why is RAM so expensive right now and will prices go down soon?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"RAM prices are high because Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have reportedly sold their entire 2027 DRAM and HBM manufacturing capacity to AI companies through long-term five-year purchasing agreements. 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