SK Hynix says 2027 will be the worst year for memory supply

SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung says 2027 will be the memory industry’s worst year from the supply side, and that customer demand could remain above the company’s capacity beyond 2030. SK Hynix is NVIDIA’s largest memory supplier and the leader in high-bandwidth memory, the stacks feeding data to AI accelerators. UBS separately expects the global DRAM market to remain undersupplied through at least the second quarter of 2028.

That does not mean the 24GB card on your shopping list doubles in price tomorrow. HBM beside a data-center GPU is not the same product as the GDDR memory on a consumer card, and this forecast comes from a company selling every bit it can make. It does mean the pressure behind AI hardware is not expected to clear when the current generation ships. SK Hynix and Samsung are already part of a South Korean plan to double the country’s memory-chip capacity in five years, and the CEO still says supply loses the race.

For a local-LLM build, this is a planning signal, not a panic-buy signal. Model software keeps finding ways to need less memory. The companies building that memory are telling us not to expect the hardware side to return the favor.