CES in 2026 sets the trend of the industry: The overflow of AI computing power demand triggers a "storage earthquake", with supply chain shortages likely to last throughout the year.

Noticed that this year's CES consumer electronics show released many noteworthy news, including industry giants such as Dell Technologies, Inc. Class C (DELL.US), Intel Corporation (INTC.US), NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US), and AMD (AMD.US). However, what observers eventually realized is that the severe shortage of memory and storage caused by the surge in demand for artificial intelligence may affect the trend for the remaining time of 2026. Wedbush Securities analyst Matt Bryson stated that the contract prices for many dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) for the first quarter have not been finalized yet, but suppliers still expect to achieve 50% or higher growth. In a report to clients, Bryson wrote, "It appears the hyperscale cloud service providers have soaked up all incremental capacity in the market, with the shifts in capacity to support these customers and the expectation for higher contract pricing raising it seems materially higher in the secondary market." However, Bryson added that the disruptions to smaller customers are "easing" as the year-on-year decline in personal computers (PC) is currently expected to be only in the mid-single digits. Nevertheless, once the price hikes are finally confirmed, these issues may receive more attention. Bryson added that the price hikes could ultimately impact some server customers as the delivery cycles for servers are "lengthening". Companies that could benefit significantly from the price hikes in DRAM include Micron (MU.US) and SanDisk (SNDK.US). Bryson stated that since SanDisk has been removed from Apple Inc.'s supply chain, its current baseline is low, and its pricing is expected to be "significantly better than" industry performance, with a 50% increase seen as the baseline scenario. Bryson also mentioned other potential beneficiaries, including Pure Storage (PSTG.US) and Silicon Motion Technology Corporation Sponsored ADR (SIMO.US). Impact on NVIDIA Corporation The large size of NVIDIA Corporation means that any of its actions are likely to have a significant impact on the semiconductor industry. Although it may benefit from the tight memory supply (due to its performance typically leading ahead of competitors), it may also further exacerbate pressure on memory space. Bryson explained, "NVIDIA Corporation's new storage layer (via BlueField-4 connection) appears to significantly increase overall storage demand, with a rough calculation we encountered showing that the new storage layer increases AI workload requirements by over 40%." Released in October 2025, BlueField-4 combines NVIDIA Corporation's Grace CPU and NVIDIA Corporation's ConnectX-9 network product, aiming to boost computing power and help support AI factories. Strong demand for hard drives Bryson stated that demand for hard disk drives (HDD) in the field of Western Digital Corporation (WDC.US) and Seagate (STX.US) is "strong". He pointed out that there is a huge gap between supply and orders, which may further widen throughout the year and may even continue until 2027. Therefore, he believes that price trends may increase, as contracts for 2028 are already under negotiation and shortages for cloud service providers are gradually becoming apparent. Impact on Intel Corporation and AMD? While the rise in memory and storage prices benefits some companies, it obviously also has some negative impacts on demand. Several PC and smartphone manufacturers have already trimmed production expectations, with the industry currently expecting low single-digit declines in both markets instead of the previously expected low single-digit growth. As Intel Corporation and AMD are the two largest PC-centric semiconductor companies, any drop in demand could potentially affect them. For Intel Corporation overall, the rise in memory costs serves as a warning signal, but the company is also impacted in other areas, especially its foundry business. According to Bryson, the successful release of the 18A process would be "a critically important step forward" for this company led by Pat Gelsinger. Earlier this month, Intel Corporation announced that it had delivered the first batch of 18A products. Nevertheless, any decrease in PC manufacturing volumes is a "major concern" for Intel Corporation, as it affects shipment volume, utilization rate, and pricing in this segment, which accounts for about 60% of its revenue. Bryson added that as Intel Corporation also covers the server market, any extension in server delivery cycles could also have a negative impact. Bryson believes that for AMD, the impact of rising memory prices presents a more complex situation as the focus is mainly on its AI accelerator product portfolio. "...we believe that if PC demand deteriorates due to memory price increases, AMD is unquestionably at some risk (we have fewer concerns in servers, as AMD may continue to gain market share in this segment, and AMD has a higher weight of cloud services provider demand)," Bryson explained. He continued, "But we also believe that in the foreseeable future, AMD's stock price performance will be driven by the expected performance of its AI GPU (rather than other indicators). In this regard, the ability to resume shipping to China could result in immediate benefits (however, we are currently unclear on the final schedule for US licensing and/or Chinese approval for purchasing American AI chips)."