If you were hoping memory prices would come down soon, you were already expecting bad news, since nobody’s been giving good news lately. Micron, one of the world’s biggest memory manufacturers (although it no longer makes products for consumers, only for companies), has warned that the RAM shortage isn’t going away and could even get worse.
According to The Register, Micron’s CEO and president, Sanjay Mehrotra, told investors during the company’s fiscal 2026 results presentation that most of next year’s memory production has already been sold. On top of that, buyers will have to pay “much higher prices” than this year’s. In other words, it’s going to be impossible to buy RAM or any product that uses RAM.
The biggest takeaway from the Micron call is probably that they expect supply in 2028 to be even tighter than in 2026.
Some Anal-ysts are claiming there will be oversupply in 2028. That’s absurd.
What this comment tells us is that a substantial portion of 2028 volume is…
— Jukan (@jukan05) October 1, 2026
How long will this RAM shortage last?
It’ll last longer than any of us would like. “In both calendar year 2027 and 2028, we expect demand to exceed supply,” Mehrotra said, adding that the shortage in those two years will be worse than the one we’re experiencing in 2026. And even more worrying, Micron doesn’t know when the situation will improve. “We don’t have a clear view of when supply and demand will come back into balance,” he admitted. Things look grim, honestly.
Micron is building new factories that should start producing in 2028, backed by planned spending of $25 billion for the first half of its new fiscal year. Unfortunately, no relief is expected when they open, since Micron executives warned that the new plants won’t immediately solve either availability or pricing problems.
AI is to blame, of course. The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that powers AI hardware is in such demand that it’s outstripping the standard DRAM used by servers.
