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Micron CEO says it'll be tougher to get memory in the next couple of years than it is today, and keeps saying it over and over again
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The head honcho of Micron, Sanjay Mehrotra, says that memory may be even harder to come by in the next two years than it is today. Now, a memory company's CEO is gonna say stuff like that during a historically momentous upturn in its business— anything to the contrary would be bad news for its share price—but it is a stark warning for all of us regular consumers still feeling the burn of the memory crisis.
"Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call," says Mehrotra during the company's Q4 earnings call (transcript from Investing.com), "and we expect memory and storage supply demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026."
"We expect memory and storage supply-demand conditions to be much tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026."
"As we noted, in calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply."
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"We have shared with you that we do not see line of sight when supply catches up with demand."
Mehrotra says this mostly comes down to AI, which is no surprise, with growing demand for agents, bigger models, and growing context. And it's not just Micron. Samsung came out this week with a similar warning: HBM demand is surging (that's the memory most often used for AI accelerators) and is expected to take another 10% of Samsung's capacity next year. As Samsung's capacity is finite and new fabs take a very long time, that's actively taking away capacity from DRAM, meaning DRAM supply may be more limited next year.
Mehrotra said something similar in the latest earnings call about capacity:
"We see continuing tight supply conditions because, first of all, clean rooms take a long while to build. Even after they are built, even after first wafer output, production ramps up only gradually in the clean rooms. That’s just the nature of what it takes to bring up production."