The global DRAM market posted strong results on demand from AI data centres.

TechRadar reported on Nov. 11 that global DRAM revenue in the third quarter of 2026 surged 369 percent from a year earlier to nearly $200 billion.

The revenue rise was driven by prices rather than volumes. Counterpoint Research estimated that average selling prices jumped to record highs as demand for AI accelerators and data centre servers continued to pressure memory supply. Bit shipment growth was about 4% in the same period.

Growth in the memory market spread to commodity DRAM. High bandwidth memory (HBM) revenue in the third quarter nearly doubled, but its share of total DRAM revenue fell. Sales of conventional DDR and LPDDR rose faster. Brady Wang (브래디 왕), an associate director at Counterpoint, said the spread of agentic AI is creating unprecedented demand for existing DRAM.

The fallout is also reaching PC and smartphone makers. Agentic AI workloads rely not only on HBM used in GPUs but also heavily on general-purpose CPU servers that use standard DDR5 memory. That has created a dynamic in which hyperscalers and consumer-device manufacturers are competing for the same memory production capacity.

Sam Altman (샘 알트먼), OpenAI's CEO, said on a podcast that too much of the world's limited DRAM supply goes into personal computers, calling it terrible. He later wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that his remarks were being misinterpreted and that he hopes everyone has a lot of RAM.

The consumer device market, by contrast, is wobbling. Global smartphone shipments in the third quarter fell 20 percent from a year earlier, marking the weakest third quarter since 2012. Retail smartphone prices rose about 20 percent this year, and PC shipments fell to 62.7 million units from 78.5 million a year earlier. TrendForce estimated that in a $900-class laptop, the CPU, RAM and SSD account for 68 percent of the bill of materials.

TrendForce forecast that DRAM price increases could steepen further in the first quarter of 2027. Micron also expected supply and demand in 2027 and 2028 to be tighter than in 2026. Jerry Chen (제리 첸), CEO of Team Group, warned that prices would not fall in 2027 and that if shortages worsen, buyers could be unable to secure products even with money.

The memory market is volatile, and there have been past cases where price rises eased as new supply increased, but multi-year contracts could slow any decline this time. Micron estimated that, through 26 multi-year contracts, more than 35 percent of its revenue will be secured by customer commitments through 2030. If that contract structure holds, memory prices may not fall quickly even if AI demand slows somewhat.