RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates ‘much higher’ prices

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Memory-maker Micron has warned that RAM shortages will persist into 2028, and perhaps beyond.

Speaking on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call, CEO and company chair Sanjay Mehrotra reminded investors that Micron has already sold most of the memory it will make next year and said customers will pay “much higher prices” than they shelled out this year.

“In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply,” he added. “In fact, we see greater tightness in the industry in 2027 and in 2028 versus 2026. Overall, supply-demand environment is only getting tighter.”

“We do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance.”

Micron plans to bring new factories online in 2028 – helped by planned capex of $25 billion in the first half of its new financial year – but execs warned those facilities won’t immediately help to improve availability or ease prices.

The CEO said demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) needed in AI hardware is growing faster than it is for the DRAM used in servers. Micron is also finding ways to expand its margins for HBM, which is currently not as profitable as DRAM.

Both types of memory are, however, enormously profitable.

Micron’s earnings announcement reveals that the gross margin for its cloud memory business unit, which focuses on HBM, reported a Q4 gross margin of 83 percent – a big jump from the 59 percent in last year’s Q4. The core datacenter business unit, which sells more DRAM, recorded Q4 gross margin of 90 percent, up from 41 percent last year. Sales of solid-state disks for use in datacenters reached almost $10 billion for the quarter, up more than 1,000 percent year over year.

Q4 revenue came in at $54.25 billion, up from $11.3 billion last year. Annual revenue landed at $133.2 billion, vastly higher than last year’s $37.4 billion. Net income rose 895 percent to $85 billion.

Mehrotra told investors Micron has “a strong roadmap for future HBM products and are proud to be working with NVIDIA on the industry’s first custom HBM4E implementation, NV-HBM, to be adopted on next generation of GPUs and NVLink fusion platforms. In NAND, AI context memory storage used for KV cache offload and HDD displacement opportunities are expanding the addressable market for SSDs.”

Micron forecast Q1 FY27 revenue of $61.5 billion plus or minus $1.5 billion, and gross margin of 86.25 percent. The company’s share price spiked, then returned to its close-of-day price in after-hours trading, suggesting investors expected its colossal growth and profit. ®

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