TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise by around 20% quarter on quarter in the fourth quarter of 2026. After roughly 80% in the second quarter and about 40% in the third, that counts as a deceleration.
The reasons given for the slowdown are worth separating from the reasons for the rise. Growth is easing because the comparison base is now high, because end-market purchasing power is weakening, and because price ceilings written into long-term agreements are gradually taking effect. The rise continues because supply is still tight and manufacturers are prioritising high-margin products, with artificial-intelligence inference workloads — larger models, longer context windows, growing key-value caches — pulling hard on server memory and enterprise storage.
A 20% quarterly increase in a commodity input is still a repricing of any product that contains memory. At that rate, a part quoted in September costs about a fifth more in December, and a bill of materials signed off in the spring is no longer the bill of materials you will build against.
The structural point is the one to remember: the capacity that would relieve this is being allocated to high-bandwidth memory for accelerators, which is a better business for the suppliers than the commodity parts in everything else. Nothing in the forecast suggests that changes within the next year.
If you are buying, the useful distinction is between contract and spot. Contract prices move quarterly and are what a manufacturer pays; spot prices move daily and are what you pay when a build is short. A design that has to be rescued on the spot market during a shortage can cost several times the contract figure for the same part.
Source: TrendForce