Samsung and SK Hynix Memory Inventories Drop Below 10 Days
South Korean brokerage KB Securities reports that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have seen their memory inventories fall below 10 days this quarter. This sharp decline leaves the world's top two memory chipmakers unable to squeeze out additional supply for sudden demand spikes. As AI infrastructure investments by hyper-scalers are projected to hit $1.3 trillion by 2027, memory is expected to jump from 14% of that hardware expenditure in 2025 to 57% by 2027. Consequently, supply deficits in both DRAM and NAND markets are predicted to exceed 10% by 2027, reshaping supply chains and raising hardware costs. The transition to HBM4 memory is a key bottleneck because producing HBM4 consumes significantly more wafer capacity than standard DRAM and even HBM3E. As production scales up for HBM4, overall memory supply measured by capacity will face immense pressure, worsening structural market shortages.
## BACKGROUND
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a 3D-stacked DRAM tech stack designed to deliver extreme data speeds required by modern AI processors. Producing HBM requires a trade-off in manufacturing capacity, as one HBM wafer typically replaces multiple wafers of standard commodity memory like DDR5.