Woah, here's a tech CEO saying the memory crisis won't be as bad as everyone expects
by https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/author/jacob-ridley/ · PC Gamer
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"It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"Jason Chen, Acer CEO
Show of hands, who is sick of the memory crisis? One, two… ah, all of you. We've been dealing with it for pretty much a year now and it's showing no signs of it stopping soon. Some even suggest the supply shortage won't work its way out of the system until 2030. Except for Acer CEO Jason Chen.
I prefer Chen's take on the whole situation. In the Economic Daily, he reportedly said DDR4 and some DDR5 chips aren't actually in short supply. Neither are CPUs, for that matter. Though I don't think we've been worrying about those as much. In regard to the whole affair, Chen is reported to have said (machine translated): "It's impossible for the shortage to last until 2030!"
According to DigiTimes and Tom's Hardware, it's high-speed DDR5 chips that Chen says are in short supply. That's more like the sorta memory we see packaged alongside Intel's Panther Lake chips than desktop PCs.
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"So they keep putting out the message: 'let me tell you, prices won’t come down until the year 20-whatever.' ”. Chen reportedly said of the memory manufacturers, whose margins and share prices are on the line.
Chen doesn't expect all this to blow over in a couple of months, mind you. He reckons that PC prices will continue to rise through the final few months of 2026, with an average price increase between 5-20%. That's on top of the already gargantuan price hikes we've seen all year—gaming PC deals are few and far between these days.
It is said that Chen expects a drop in prices to occur around the middle of 2027. Further to that, a proper price drop towards the end of next year. That does mean a lot of turmoil yet to come for PC gamers, but it's also a whole lot sooner than many others.
I'd love to take Chen's word on this one, but we do have a pile of forecasts to the contrary on this one. DRAM demand has been expected to outstrip supply by double-digit exabytes in 2030; SK hynix's CEO predicts it may go beyond 2030, though as the leader of a major memory manufacturer, it's tough to know what to make of that; Micron has previously guessed that demand will outstrip its own supply through the foreseeable future; and while all memory companies have expansion plans, fabs take a very long time to build.
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On the flipside, Chinese DRAM manufacturers are closing the gap on Korean and American competition. CXMT has reportedly snapped up 7% of the market, according to Counterpoint Research. That puts pressure on those companies to act outside of their pre-defined plans for maximum profitability. New production capacity, especially in China, is one of the things that Chen suggests could see the shortage ending earlier than expected.
I'd love to take Chen at face value here, but in all honesty, I'm still not convinced we'll see this one sorted for a while. Power of positive thinking?
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