TrendForce Forecasts 20% Q4 DRAM Price Surge Due to AI Demand
Market research firm TrendForce forecasts that DRAM contract prices will rise by approximately 20% quarter-over-quarter in the fourth quarter of 2026. This growth represents a slowdown compared to earlier quarters, driven by high existing price bases and purchase limits. The continuous surge in AI infrastructure demand and memory capacity shifts toward high-end products are maintaining high price pressures on traditional DRAM. This directly impacts hardware costs and availability across the technology ecosystem. NVIDIA is reportedly considering reducing the HBM stack layers for Rubin Ultra from 12 to 8 to ease supply constraints, despite potential 10% to 20% higher per-gigabit costs in 2027. Meanwhile, server DRAM and enterprise SSD capacity demands remain strong due to expanding AI inference workloads.
## BACKGROUND
DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) is a common type of semiconductor memory used in computers and servers for temporary data storage. HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is an advanced stacked memory technology that delivers massive bandwidth for high-performance processors like GPUs, while KV cache optimizes transformer-based AI models during text generation by storing previous key-value pairs.