IT之家 (ITHome) October 21 news: Market research firm TrendForce, citing multiple reports,estimates that DRAM contract prices in the fourth quarter of 2026 will rise about 20% quarter-over-quarter.In terms of growth rate, this represents a slowdown compared with the second quarter (about 80%) and the third quarter (about 40%),but the DRAM market as a whole remains at high price levels, in a cycle of tight supply and strong demand.
According to a blog post cited by IT之家, the core factor driving price increases is the continued expansion of AI inference demand. Larger models, longer context windows, and growing KV cache demand are driving capacity and bandwidth demand for server DRAM and enterprise-grade SSDs; at the same time, major memory manufacturers are prioritizing capacity for high-end products such as HBM, making conventional DRAM supply even tighter.
However, the slowdown in price growth also has practical reasons: the earlier price base was already high, purchasing power in end markets has weakened, and price caps in some long-term purchase agreements are gradually taking effect, limiting further rapid price increases.
On the HBM front, due to tight supply, NVIDIA is reportedly considering reducing the HBM stack layer count of Rubin Ultra from 12 layers to 8 layers. If other conditions remain unchanged, the HBM capacity per GPU would fall by about 33%, but the same DRAM chip supply could theoretically support 50% more GPU shipments. However, because the base die accounts for a higher share of cost in 8-layer HBM, the cost per Gb in 2027 is expected to be 10% to 20% higher than for 12 layers instead.