Markos@MarkosAAIG
First of all, I get this feeling with this whole memory cycle that everybody is talking from their own expertise and viewpoint, and nobody is looking at the whole picture. One side is talking from a wafer perspective, saying we can get this online. Another side is only looking at demand, without taking into account the ramp-ups in HBM4E and HBM5 in terms of specifications. I think everybody is shouting from one end of the room to the other, but nobody is taking the time to put everyone together in the same room and look at the complete picture.
That being said, the following:
First, the denominator of @pequityresearch his post. His 4–5% gap is ALL DRAM bits. HBM is roughly a tenth of DRAM bits. So a 25% shortage in HBM is only 3% of total DRAM it fits INSIDE his number. Both are true at once: the commodity plane can drift toward balance while HBM stays hard-rationed. When someone says "DRAM will balance," first question: which DRAM?
And "only 3% of bits" is exactly why it moves everything. HBM sells for at least five to ten times commodity DRAM per gigabyte a tenth of the bits already carries over a quarter of industry revenue, heading past half by decade-end, and most of the profit growth. Our revenue pool is exabytes times blended price; the conservative blend rises 15 to 23 $ per GB into 2028 on mix alone, before any like-for-like move. HBM and commodity DRAM are built on the same leading-edge wafers, and every HBM gigabyte eats 3–4x the wafer area. Leading-edge wafers migrating to AI memory HBM and now server LPDDR is what repriced conventional DRAM up 93–98% in one quarter. The 3% is the tail that prices the whole thing in this quoted post.
In chart below you see the argument in one picture. Every 2030 forecast if it’s bull, bear, or base. @zephyr_z9 pointed it out with 37.5 EB full frontier shipped Hbm4e at 1TB, hbm5 at 1,5TB it al comes down to what share of the world's best wafers gets fed to HBM. A quarter carries our locked supply floor. Half carries our band top. The most aggressive build in circulation needs 86 percent @zephyr_z9 (almost no hbm4 shipping only 4e and 5) at which point no commodity recovery is left to model. The wafers are gone. You cannot have the balance story and the HBM story out of the same fabs. Pick your point on the slider; that IS your thesis.
In addition, the input these models never state: HBM content per system in the very window they call balanced. Rubin carries 288GB per GPU. Rubin Ultra, shipping into that window, carries 576GB. The terabyte class I just explained comes after. Model 2028 systems at 2026 content and you understate HBM demand roughly 2x per system, more in wafers flattering both sides of the equation at once: too little HBM demand AND too many wafers left over for everything else. That's how a paper equilibrium gets built. No platform generation has ever carried less HBM than the one before it. Their balance assumes it. For now no evidence only increases in roadmaps.
Third, the elasticity everyone is about to cite: AI token demand elasticity around 1.4 cut price 30%, volume grows 40%+. Some read that as the cushion under any price decline. But token elasticity is not DRAM elasticity: four layers sit between a memory bit and a token, and the pass-through is neither one-to-one nor stable. More fundamentally elastic demand under rationed supply doesn't cushion a price fall, it prevents it. If volume surges the moment price dips and the fabs already ship everything they can build, where does the extra volume come from? Elasticity in a shortage isn't some shock absorber it is the fuel why we are in a shortage in the first place.
Fourth, the source. Senior employee. HBM CPO? Or osat? Or what does he do. You need to be at least fully strategy up to date and have the whole picture. I reffer back to my opening statement. the 1b-to-1c node point is real it closed much of the 2025 shortfall. But even on the most dense node at 95% yield I get shortage as outcome. 👇
$MU
