Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

Summary

Skip to main Skip to search Skip to footer Markets and Trends December 18, 2025 10 min Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis and the Potential Impact on the Smartphone and PC Markets in 2026 Share In late 2025, the global semiconductor ecosystem is experiencing an unprecedented memory chip shortage with knock-on effects for the device manufacturers and end users that could persist well into 2027. DRAM prices have surged significantly as demand from AI data centers continues to outstrip supply, creating a supply/demand imbalance. IDC was monitoring the memory situation as we prepared our November device forecasts, and we factored them into the update. The situation, however, has become more acute since publishing, and we feel it’s important we address the situation. Although we are maintaining our official forecasts as the situation is still evolving, we will offer here two downside risk scenarios that may play out in two critical markets: Smartphones and Personal Computers. What’s causing the shortage? The memory market is at an unprecedented inflexion point, with demand materially outpacing supply. For an industry that has long been characterized by boom-and-bust cycles, this time is different. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and workloads is exerting significant pressure on the memory ecosystem. These AI workloads require large amounts of memory, and the shortage, in part, is driven by a reallocation of manufacturing capacity away from consumer electronics toward high-margin memory solutions to support AI. Instead of expanding conventional DRAM and NAND used in smartphones, PCs, and other consumer electronics, major memory makers have shifted production toward memory used in AI data centers, such as high-bandwidth (HBM) and high-capacity DDR5. This has restricted the supply of general-purpose memory modules and driven up prices across the board. AI servers and enterprise environments require far more memory per system than consumer devices, so th...