Institution: HBM4 prices may rise to $4-5 per thousand bits in the second half of this year, as AI demand and production capacity bottlenecks lead to half of global DRAM capacity being locked by major manufacturers.

The DigiTimes report shows that due to the surge in demand for AI and the structural bottleneck in production capacity, the price of the next generation HBM4 may increase from $2 per kilobit to $4-5 and above in the second half of 2026. This is partly because of the extreme complexity of the HBM4 manufacturing process: its production cycle is as long as four to six months, and the initial yield rate is significantly low; on the other hand, the production of HBM consumes about three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5DRAM, severely limiting the total memory capacity that manufacturers can produce in existing facilities.