DRAM prices and AI: why memory is up 400% by J.P. Morgan's estimate

J.P. Morgan Global Research estimates that DRAM prices will rise more than 400% from the start of 2024 to the end of 2026, and the chipmaker that sells the memory just printed the receipts. If you are asking why DRAM prices are surging because of AI, the short answer is that data centers are absorbing the supply, and the buyers have signed multiyear contracts to keep it that way. This is the physical race to superintelligence showing up as a line item, and it is landing on every other buyer of memory.

What J.P. Morgan actually estimated

The estimate comes from a J.P. Morgan Global Research piece dated August 6, 2026. It is an analyst estimate, not a measured price index, and it runs to the end of 2026, so part of it is still a forecast as of October 5, 2026. Treat the 400% as a bank's projection of a cumulative move across three years.

The same note tries to trace the cost into the wider economy. It reports that the consumer price index for software and accessories and the producer price index for storage devices have each risen 23% since the end of 2024, and that the import price index for computers, peripherals and parts is up 37%. It also attributes a 0.2 to 0.4 percentage point lift in inflation to the memory shortage.

J.P. Morgan equity analyst Jay Kwon put the outlook bluntly in the note.

> "Given ~90% annualized token cost per watt decline and rising agentic AI computation workload demand, it is not a secret that the industry will stay in shortage for multiple years."

Cheaper tokens, in other words, widen the pool of workloads worth running.

The supplier's side: Micron's quarter

Micron reported fiscal fourth quarter results on September 30, 2026, and they are the primary evidence that the money is real. In its filing, revenue was $54.23 billion, against $11.32 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. For the full fiscal year, revenue was $133.19 billion, compared with $37.38 billion in fiscal 2025, and GAAP gross margin was 80.7%. Its core data center business unit alone booked $18.00 billion in the quarter. Guidance for the next quarter is $61.5 billion, plus or minus $1.5 billion.

A memory maker earning more than 80 cents of gross profit on each dollar of revenue holds the pricing power. In the filing, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra framed the demand in the race's own vocabulary: "AI is becoming Super Intelligence (SI), and memory enhances this intelligence and the competitiveness of our customers' platforms." That is a vendor line, and we read it as marketing language wrapped around a very large order book.

Why it will not fix itself quickly

On the earnings call, as transcribed by Investing.com, Mehrotra said memory and storage supply and demand conditions should be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than in 2026. He added that even with additional industry clean room space planned, "we do not have line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance." Micron says more than 75% of its fiscal 2027 output is already committed, and that it has completed agreements for the vast majority of its calendar 2027 HBM bit supply at significant year over year price increases. Its chief financial officer guided to roughly $25 billion of capital spending in the first half of fiscal 2027, after $27.37 billion in all of fiscal 2026.

The supply problem is physical. A new fab or clean room takes years to build, so new capacity cannot answer a demand spike measured in quarters.

What TrendForce sees for the next two quarters

TrendForce, a research firm that tracks contract prices, said on September 30, 2026 that conventional DRAM contract prices should rise 10% to 15% quarter over quarter in the fourth quarter of 2026, and NAND flash prices 15% to 20%. That is slower than earlier quarters, but still an increase on top of the increases.

An earlier TrendForce release, dated August 25, 2026, puts the weight of the demand in numbers. It projects capital expenditure at the major cloud providers to grow 98% in 2026 and another 50% in 2027, with DRAM and NAND flash reaching 68% of that spending in 2027, up from 47% in 2026. It also projects server DRAM prices up about 270% across 2026 and HBM contract prices up 70% to 140% in 2027. These are the research firm's forecasts, not settled prices.

The same September release shows where the pain is. Notebook makers are carrying inventories built with costlier components, and PC brands are trimming storage capacities to protect their bills of materials.

Who pays

The cost shows up in three places.

• Cloud and lab budgets. If memory becomes more than two thirds of cloud capex in 2027, as TrendForce projects, the dollars that were meant for accelerators are being redirected to the part that feeds them. For a view on the financing behind that spending, see who is paying for the AI data center boom.
• Consumers and small builders. Laptops, phones and servers bought outside the hyperscalers draw from the same constrained wafer supply, and the producer and import price data in J.P. Morgan's note is the early trace of that.
• The power side. Memory is one more bottleneck beside electricity. Our look at what the data center electricity numbers show covers the other constraint.

What to watch next

Samsung Electronics is expected to publish preliminary third quarter results around October 8, 2026, according to Seoul Economic Daily, with analysts looking for a roughly 22% quarter over quarter rise in its average DRAM selling price. Its results, and SK hynix's, will show whether the price curve is flattening or just slowing.

We could not independently confirm a figure for how much of the 400% had been realized as of today, and none of the three sources gives one. Treat any headline that states it as a measured fact with caution. No on-record quote from a hyperscaler buyer was available to us, so the buyer's view of these prices is missing from this account.

Our take

The memory shortage is the most concrete evidence that the race is limited by atoms, not just ideas. We would not read the 400% as a settled number, but we would read Micron's margins, its sold out 2027 order book and its refusal to promise balance as a strong signal that pricing power sits with three suppliers for at least two more years. Watch the first signs of a ceiling: buyers shrinking specifications, quarterly increases falling below 10%, or a major cloud customer publicly cutting its capex guidance. Until one appears, assume that every frontier training run and every consumer laptop is paying the same memory tax.