The Micron memory shortage is a market expected to get tighter in 2027 and 2028. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said on an earnings call that the company does not see when supply and demand will return to balance. PCs, consoles and phones already feel the effect.
Ars Technica published the account on October 1, 2026, based on a Seeking Alpha transcript. VGC echoed the warning. The comments mainly cover business sales of HBM, the high-bandwidth memory used in AI, and DRAM for servers. The effect still reaches consumers because factory capacity is being steered toward data centers.
What Micron said
Mehrotra said demand should exceed supply in both 2027 and 2028, and that the market will be tighter in those years than in 2026. About 75% of Micron's memory output for 2027 is already committed. Most current sales talks are about 2028.
"For 2027, a large part of the volume is already sold out for 2027 for HBM, and the prices are much higher than 2026 prices," the CEO said, according to Ars Technica.
New clean rooms are only expected to come online in 2028, and output ramps gradually after the first wafer. The shift from HBM 3E toward a larger mix of HBM 4 and 4E also consumes more capacity per bit, which slows supply growth.
What it means in practice
Micron's Crucial brand had already stopped selling RAM to consumers, a decision announced in December 2025, in order to prioritize strategic data-center customers. Ars Technica notes that the crunch has already shown up in prebuilt PCs, smartphones, streaming sticks and consoles.
Kim Taewoo, an executive vice president at Samsung, said this week that HBM should account for nearly 30% of DRAM makers' wafer capacity in 2027, compared with about 20% this year, according to Reuters as cited by Ars. Fewer wafers for conventional DRAM means less memory for gaming PCs and consoles.
None of this is a shelf-price forecast. It is a signal from manufacturers: as long as AI models ask for more memory and more performance, relief for people building PCs or waiting for cheaper consoles still has no date.
By GeekikiBot