The strong case is pretty much only if you can't wait another 3-4 years for ram prices to come back down.
Memory makers are responding with a huge build-out. Building a fab shell and cleanroom takes years, which is why the crunch has lasted so long, but many of these projects are now well underway. New capacity is what ended past memory shortages. New factories going in:
SK hynix
M15X, Cheongju, Korea: first wafers early 2026 (reported), ramping through 2027 Yongin Y1, Korea: first cleanroom Feb 2027 (company target) Yongin Y2, Korea: groundbreaking planned July 2027, first cleanroom June 2029 Micron
ID1, Boise: first wafer output mid-2027 Tongluo, Taiwan: an existing PSMC cleanroom it bought for $1.8B, with meaningful shipments mid-2027 ID2, Boise: late 2028 Hiroshima, Japan: broke ground July 2026, with initial output late 2028 Clay, New York (up to 4 fabs, $100B): broke ground Jan 2026, with first output in 2030 Samsung
P5, Pyeongtaek: mass production 2028 (reported) Yongin national complex: site work began Oct 2026, with the first fab targeting Oct 2029 (reported; Samsung hasn't given a date) Nanya
Fab 5A, New Taipei: 10nm-class EUV DRAM, with wafer starts in 2H 2027 (reported) Tesla / SpaceX (Terafab)
Research fab at Giga Texas, Austin: broke ground April 2026. There's no official output date. Grimes County, Texas (logic, memory, packaging; Phase 1 over $16.8B): land clearing since Aug 2026. Texas filings say commercial operations in 2028, but SemiAnalysis estimates late 2029.
The first real supply relief is 2027, a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
Sources: Micron FQ4 2026 call, the SK hynix newsroom, TrendForce, Texas JETI filings via ENR, and Tom's Hardware/SemiAnalysis.
> which is why the crunch has lasted so long,
It's been like a year-ish...
And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,
> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.
Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.
[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.
[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...
> Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload
Honestly I think most of us are just spoiled kids crying when our expensive toys are being taken away. If memory cost 10x more to manufacture than it does now, we’d just have 10x less ram in our computers and our software would be written to deal with that. We’ve done it before. My first computer had 4mb of ram and it ran windows 3.1 just fine. We still had working compilers. If ram were 10x cheaper before the supply shock, I think we’d be crying that companies won’t buy us 320gb ram in our laptops. The java and rust compilers would somehow be even less ram efficient. Firefox and chrome would still happily use it all to run adware across the same 50 tabs I want to keep open.
Theres good reason for LLMs to need that much ram. But very little else we do on our computers needs anywhere near as much ram as we use. Have faster computers made video games more fun in the last two decades? I don’t think so.
The supply crisis is annoying. But I’m also a little glad there’s a reason to push back on fat, lazy software.
I noticed yesterday that the original Ultima 7 required 2 MB of RAM and a 386 or 386SX [1]
You can buy a version from gog that runs on Windows 10 requiring 2 GB of RAM and an unspecified 1.8GHz CPU [2]
[1] https://www.mocagh.org/origin/u7completeaus-manual.pdf
[2] https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultima_7_complete
I bet these factories exclusively build DDR6 and whatever GDDR is up to next, rather than DDR5, since that was already scheduled for 2027 anyways. Hopefully they don’t immediately shutter their DDR5 facilities rather than cut into their 90% operating margins :)