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Driven by the AI craze, Industry sources: HBM 4 price may double next year

2026-07-11·newswire-us-stock-070001
Driven by the AI craze, Industry sources: HBM 4 price may double next year.

According to a report released by DigiTimes on Friday, industry sources pointed out that the price of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is expected to double by 2027, driven by a combination of surging demand for artificial intelligence and structural bottlenecks in production capacity.

Industry sources say next-generation HBM4 prices could surge from about $2/gigabit in the second half of 2026 to $4 to $5 or more.

On the one hand, this is due to the extreme complexity of the HBM4 manufacturing process: its production cycle is as long as four to six months, and the initial yield is significantly low; on the other hand, HBM's production consumes approximately three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5 DRAM, severely limiting the total memory that manufacturers can produce in existing facilities.

What further aggravates the supply tension is that the three major global HBM manufacturers - Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology - are locking in global memory supply by signing long-term agreements with first-level AI customers for a period of three to five years.

DigiTimes predicts that by 2027, about half of the world's total DRAM production capacity will be completely unavailable to small buyers. Although Nvidia's upcoming Rubin architecture is accelerating the development of HBM4, memory manufacturers are also facing an unexpected economic trade-off: the strong performance of the standard server memory market.

This year, DDR5 profit margins for some suppliers have exceeded 80%, forcing chipmakers to demand higher HBM pricing to justify shifting away from traditional DRAM production lines. On Wall Street, this structural tightening supply narrative is expected to continue to be a powerful catalyst for key memory chip stocks.

On Friday, SK Hynix made its debut in the U.S. stock market through American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), setting a record issuance scale of US$26.5 billion. Its price is at a significant premium compared to the local stock price in Seoul, showing the strong continuation of huge transactions in the field of artificial intelligence storage.

Despite recent market concerns that technology giants may cut infrastructure spending, according to supply chain sources, artificial intelligence hardware will still face a fundamental supply shortage by 2027.

Therefore, it is expected that by the end of 2026, chip suppliers will maintain an absolute price advantage in contract negotiations, leaving consumer electronics manufacturers that have not yet signed contracts to face serious supply shortage risks. (

#Stocks #Nvidia #AI #Semiconductors #Bonds

Full text

Driven by the AI craze, Industry sources: HBM 4 price may double next year

[Industry insiders driven by the AI boom: HBM4 prices may double next year] According to a report released by DigiTimes on Friday, industry sources pointed out that driven by a combination of surging demand for artificial intelligence and structural bottlenecks in production capacity, the price of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is expected to double by 2027. Industry sources say next-generation HBM4 prices could surge from about $2/gigabit in the second half of 2026 to $4 to $5 or more.

According to a report released by DigiTimes on Friday, industry sources pointed out that the price of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is expected to double by 2027, driven by a combination of surging demand for artificial intelligence and structural bottlenecks in production capacity. Industry sources say next-generation HBM4 prices could surge from about $2/gigabit in the second half of 2026 to $4 to $5 or more. On the one hand, this is due to the extreme complexity of the HBM4 manufacturing process: its production cycle is as long as four to six months, and the initial yield is significantly low; on the other hand, HBM's production consumes approximately three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5 DRAM, severely limiting the total memory that manufacturers can produce in existing facilities. What further aggravates the supply tension is that the three major global HBM manufacturers - Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology - are locking in global memory supply by signing long-term agreements with first-level AI customers for a period of three to five years. DigiTimes predicts that by 2027, about half of the world's total DRAM production capacity will be completely unavailable to small buyers. Although Nvidia's upcoming Rubin architecture is accelerating the development of HBM4, memory manufacturers are also facing an unexpected economic trade-off: the strong performance of the standard server memory market. This year, DDR5 profit margins for some suppliers have exceeded 80%, forcing chipmakers to demand higher HBM pricing to justify shifting away from traditional DRAM production lines. On Wall Street, this structural tightening supply narrative is expected to continue to be a powerful catalyst for key memory chip stocks. On Friday, SK Hynix made its debut in the U.S. stock market through American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), setting a record issuance scale of US$26.5 billion. Its price is at a significant premium compared to the local stock price in Seoul, showing the strong continuation of huge transactions in the field of artificial intelligence storage. Despite recent market concerns that technology giants may cut infrastructure spending, according to supply chain sources, artificial intelligence hardware will still face a fundamental supply shortage by 2027. Therefore, it is expected that by the end of 2026, chip suppliers will maintain an absolute price advantage in contract negotiations, leaving consumer electronics manufacturers that have not yet signed contracts to face serious supply shortage risks. (

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