Wedbush: Memory supply continues to be tight in the AI and high-performance computing sectors.

The 2025 Global Supercomputing Conference (SC25) was held in St. Louis, USA last week. Participants generally believe that high demand for memory especially flash memory and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) will continue to drive up prices. Wedbush analysts stated that the conference was dominated by exhibitions related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), with discussions revolving around the supply shortages of NAND and DRAM, leading to skyrocketing memory prices. Analysts Matt Bryson and Antoine Legault wrote in an investor report, "Memory supply remains tight, and NAND has recently experienced a sharp price increase trend similar to DRAM starting in October. Prices have surged suddenly, often by double digits, and have experienced multiple increases in the past month." SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron Technology, Inc. are the main market share holders of DRAM. The highest NAND producers include Samsung, SK Hynix, Western Digital Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Micron Technology, Inc. Wedbush also emphasized the increased interest in quantum computing at the conference. Matt Bryson pointed out, "Although most of the current activities in the field of quantum computing are still focused on supporting large laboratories or universities, we observe an increasing interest from the business sector in quantum computing and its various technological pathways, including companies such as IBM, Fujitsu, D-Wave, IonQ, Quantum Computing, Qunova, and IQM." Furthermore, Wedbush examined the processors used in the top 500 most powerful supercomputers globally. There were 45 new entrants on this year's list, but interestingly, none broke into the existing top ten. However, with several new U.S. Energy Corp. projects currently in development using AMD and NVIDIA Corporation systems, this situation is expected to change next year. Among the new systems on the list, processors from AMD, Intel Corporation, and NVIDIA Corporation appeared the most. Arm accounted for 10% of the new processors. Matt Bryson stated, "NVIDIA Corporation once again emerged as the leading supplier of GPU slots in supercomputing systems, with 30 GPU slots and 6 CPU slots. Intel Corporation received a total of 25 slots (all CPU), while AMD received 18 slots (14 CPU and 4 GPU)." Wedbush rates Intel Corporation as "neutral", while AMD and NVIDIA Corporation were both rated as "outperform".