Apacer CEO warns commodity DRAM supply will fall 70% in 2027, echoing SK Hynix CEO; signals memory shortage risk.

Apacer CEO C.K. Chang has warned that commodity DRAM supply could plummet by as much as 70 percent in 2027, with manufacturers potentially releasing only 30 percent of their 2026 volumes in the year ahead. This projection echoes recent warnings from SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung, who suggested that 2027 "will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective."

According to a Business Times report, memory-related wafer supply is expected to increase by around 12 percent annually in 2027–2028, but approximately half of this capacity will be consumed by HBM (high-bandwidth memory). Samsung will ship around 12 billion GB of HBM in 2026, ramping up to 20 billion GB in 2027. SK hynix will supply 18 billion GB of HBM in 2026 and 24 billion GB in 2027. Consequently, non-HBM DRAM bit growth will be confined to an annual rate of 15 percent in 2027–2028, even as demand is expected to grow by 22 percent.

New manufacturing capacity will come online gradually. Samsung's P5 Fab 1 will begin production by July 2027, with P5 Fab 2 and a facility at Yongin following by 2029. For SK hynix, the Yongin Y1 fab will commence operations in February 2027, and the Y2 facility in the second half of 2028.

During its recent earnings call, SK hynix stated: "We expect memory demand in general to keep expanding, not only for HBM for AI and compute, but also for server DRAM to support Agentic AI and high-performance, high-capacity NAND to accommodate the expansion of AI services, as well as growth in data."

A potential relief for the consumer electronics industry may emerge from CXMT's commercialization of 3D DRAM technology, which stacks memory cells vertically to increase capacity rather than relying on increasingly smaller horizontal features etched with EUV machines. This approach maximizes bit density and storage capacity without requiring further horizontal node shrinks.