Z.M.F. Grodziński

W anzugu więc pełna kultura

Korean DRAM export prices just hit $64,000 per kilogram. The same chip sold for under $11,000 a year ago. The hockey stick is what AI is doing to the global memory market. HBM and conventional DRAM are built on the same fab lines. Every wafer SK Hynix and Samsung dedicate to high-bandwidth memory is a wafer they don't ship as DDR5 server modules or DDR4 desktop sticks. HBM also consumes roughly 3 wafers for every 1 wafer of equivalent DDR5 capacity. Supply gets eaten faster than the revenue line suggests. NVIDIA accounts for roughly 90% of SK Hynix HBM output. SK Hynix sold out its 2025 HBM allocation by mid-2024, locked in all of 2026 by mid-2025, and is now pricing 2027. Samsung and Micron are sold out through 2026 too. AI alone is projected to consume 20% of total DRAM production in 2026. Now the cascade. Retail DDR5 prices climbed 123% in 2025. Another 45% increase is forecast for 2026. A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that sold for $80 to $100 in early 2025 trades at $364 to $529 today. A 4x repricing on the same SKU, same speed, same generation. Phones get the same bill. Xiaomi told investors its DRAM cost per device will rise 25% in 2026. Some OEMs are quietly engineering downgraded SKUs, 8GB laptops and 4GB phones, just to keep a product on the shelf. The Phison CEO warned that some consumer electronics manufacturers will exit product lines entirely by end of year. Gaming GPUs caught the same wave. NVIDIA cut RTX gaming production 30 to 40% in the first half of 2026 because GDDR7 ships from the same Korean fabs that make HBM. Same factory floor, different SKU. HBM wins the priority queue. Three companies set the price of every memory chip on earth. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron together control about 95% of global DRAM. Korean exports alone account for two-thirds. In October, OpenAI signed a letter of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix for 900,000 wafers a month for Stargate. Per month. Memory was historically the worst business in tech. Cyclical, commoditized, single-digit operating margins through entire decades. SK Hynix now runs over 50% operating margin and just posted another record quarterly profit. SK Group's chairman said publicly that the wafer shortage will persist until 2030 because cleanroom buildouts take five years and nobody is willing to overbuild into an AI bust. Memory stopped being cyclical the day NVIDIA wanted all of it.