Morgan Stanley's supply-driven call on legacy DRAM
Morgan Stanley has projected that DDR4 prices will rise by 50 percent in the third quarter of 2026 and a further 10 percent in the fourth quarter, attributing the squeeze to ongoing wafer migration toward HBM, DDR5, and higher-layer NAND. The investment bank framed the outlook as primarily supply-driven, noting that memory makers are starving legacy DRAM to feed more profitable advanced products. SLC NAND, by contrast, is projected to climb 50 percent in each of the remaining two quarters of 2026.
DDR5 and HBM reshape the pricing stack
The same report situates legacy DRAM's surge within a broader price reset in which HBM's appetite for wafers is rippling through every memory segment. Wccftech reports that HBM consumes roughly three times as many silicon wafers as conventional DRAM, partly because memory cells cannot be placed close to the through-silicon vias that connect stacked layers. UBS has projected that NVIDIA alone will consume about 25.1 billion Gb of HBM in 2027 out of an industry-wide total near 61.5 billion Gb, underscoring how much upstream capacity is being diverted from mature DRAM. Spot prices for DDR5-5600/6400 24GB modules rose 8 percent in August alone, according to Bank of America data cited in the report, extending a year-over-year gain of 483 percent and lifting individual chip prices from roughly $8 in mid-2025 to near $47.
Nvidia weighs lower HBM configurations
Industry sources cited by Nocutnews say Nvidia is testing configurations of its next-generation Rubin Ultra GPU that would carry less HBM than the 1 TB of HBM4E it originally unveiled, including variants at approximately 192 GB and 256 GB of HBM4. The reported motivation is the rising cost burden of HBM, which UBS estimates at 62 percent of the roughly $38,902 bill of materials for Nvidia's Vera Rubin superchip. Analysts quoted in the report caution that any reduction in HBM per GPU is unlikely to dent aggregate HBM demand, since easier supply could increase overall GPU shipments.
Commodity DRAM closes the profitability gap
General-purpose server DRAM has become disproportionately profitable as HBM-constrained supply tightens. TrendForce data cited in the coverage shows commodity DRAM contract prices jumping 93–98 percent quarter-over-quarter in the first quarter of 2026, with a further 58–63 percent increase expected in the second quarter. Samsung Electronics told investors that demand growth for DRAM, SSDs, and HBM is outpacing pockets of consumer slowdown, and that the supply-demand gap is set to widen further in 2027.
Uncertain demand response
It remains unclear how durable the price surge will be if hyperscalers like Nvidia formally reduce HBM stack sizes on flagship accelerators. While most analysts expect lower per-GPU HBM allocations to expand total shipments rather than reduce HBM consumption, the report flags no firm forecast on how DDR4 and DDR5 spot prices would respond if AI customers meaningfully trim memory content.
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