The memory shortage squeezing the price of everything from laptops to game consoles is not going to end soon — and the pricing is already locked in.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on 30 September that demand for the company's memory will exceed supply through 2027 and 2028, and that he sees a tighter market in both years than in 2026. More than 75 percent of Micron's 2027 output is already committed, he said, and much of its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for 2027 is sold out — at prices "much higher than 2026 prices."
Micron no longer sells consumer RAM: its Crucial brand pulled out of that market, a change announced in December 2025. Mehrotra's remarks concern business-to-business sales of HBM for AI accelerators and server DRAM, but they matter to consumers because manufacturing capacity is being steered toward AI and data centres, leaving less memory for the devices people actually buy.
Rival Samsung supplied the second data point. Executive Kim Taewoo said HBM will claim almost 30 percent of DRAM manufacturers' wafer capacity in 2027, up from about 20 percent this year, which further limits the DRAM available for consumer products.
Micron plans new clean rooms in 2028, but executives warn that supply will not catch up quickly: new fabs ramp gradually, and future node transitions deliver less productivity gain per wafer. The squeeze is already visible in the price of prebuilt PCs, phones, streaming sticks and consoles — and analyst forecasts suggest buyers should expect it to persist rather than unwind.
