Industry professionals: HBM4 prices may double next year.

According to a report released by DigiTimes on Friday, industry insiders pointed out that due to the dual push of the surge in demand for artificial intelligence and structural bottlenecks in production capacity, the price of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is expected to double by 2027. Industry insiders stated that the price of the next generation HBM4 may skyrocket from around $2 per gigabit in the second half of 2026 to $4 to $5 or even higher. This is partly due to the extreme complexity of the manufacturing process of HBM4: its production cycle is as long as four to six months, with significantly low initial yields; on the other hand, HBM consumes three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5 DRAM, severely limiting the total memory capacity that manufacturers can produce in existing facilities. Further exacerbating the supply crunch is that the three major global HBM manufacturers - Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology, Inc. - are locking global memory supply through long-term agreements with tier-one AI customers lasting three to five years. According to DigiTimes' forecast, by 2027, approximately half of the global DRAM total capacity will be completely unavailable to smaller buyers. Although NVIDIA Corporation's upcoming Rubin architecture is accelerating the development process of HBM4, memory manufacturers are facing an unexpected economic dilemma: the strong performance of the standard server memory market. This year, the profit margins of some suppliers of DDR5 have exceeded 80%, forcing chip manufacturers to demand higher HBM pricing to justify the rationality of transitioning from traditional DRAM production lines. On Wall Street, this structural tightening supply narrative is expected to continue to be a strong catalyst for key storage chip stocks. On Friday, SK Hynix made its debut on the US stock market through American Depositary Receipts (ADR), with a historic issuance size of $26.5 billion, priced significantly higher than the Seoul local stock price, demonstrating a strong continuation trend of massive transactions in the artificial intelligence storage field. Although recent market concerns about tech giants cutting infrastructure spending, according to supply chain channel sources, artificial intelligence hardware is still facing fundamental supply shortages by 2027. Therefore, it is expected that by the end of 2026, chip suppliers will maintain an absolute price advantage in contract negotiations, putting consumer electronics manufacturers who have not yet signed contracts at serious risk of supply shortages. This article is reprinted from "Cailianshe"; GMTEight Editor: Huang Xiaodong.