- The president of a major memory chip maker issues a worrying warning
- Chey Tae-won notes: “We need some time to make more wafers, at least four to five years”
- This is a more pessimistic prediction than the one made by analyst firms.
One of the world’s leading memory chip makers estimates that the RAM shortage and resulting pricing crisis could persist until the end of this decade.
PK Press Club reports that Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group, made the dire prediction that the AMR crisis may not be over until 2030.
Chey said: “So we need some time to produce more platelets, at least four to five years. The current shortage could continue until 2030, so we expect a shortage of more than 20% of platelets.
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These are the wafers used to make memory chips, and a particular challenge at the moment is that AI is creating high demand for a certain type of RAM, namely HBM or high bandwidth memory. SK Hynix, a division of SK Group, is Nvidia’s primary HBM provider.
Chey explained: “Basically, the AI wants to have a lot of HBM, and once you make the HBM… we have to use a lot of wafers.”
SK Hynix is one of the three major RAM manufacturers in the world, the others being Samsung and Micron.
Analysis: A worrying prediction, but SK Hynix has a plan
There is a lot of profit in selling this memory for AI use – much more than with consumer RAM, of course – and so the priorities are skewed, and the latter fares worse.
Chey predicts that demand for AI will continue to stretch supply to the extent that it will take four years to scale up production to keep pace with the supply required for the AI industry, as well as consumer products.
While we’ve seen predictions that the AMR crisis will continue until 2028, we’ve heard hints that it could be longer – and the SK Group Chairman has certainly extended that deadline worryingly here.
On a more positive note, Chey also indicated that SK Hynix is developing a plan to try to stabilize RAM prices. An announcement on this will come from the CEO, we’re told, and we hope it will be available soon.
In the short term, however, it is likely that the situation in the Middle East and its effects on energy prices will not make things easier for the supply chain in terms of the cost of marketing AMR.
MSI just called 2026 “the toughest year since the company was founded” in terms of drag issues caused by the memory crisis, and that’s expected to impact the number of shipments of the company’s budget gaming laptops.
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