- SK Hynix just published its Q3 2026 financial results
- These came with a prediction of the RAM crisis lasting until 2030
- After that, expect a further drain on memory supply from “physical AI such as autonomous driving and robotics”
Apologies for bringing you more negative news about the RAM crisis, but we’ve heard yet another prediction that supply woes are going to last for the rest of this decade.
This time it’s SK Hynix (again) weighing in, a memory chip maker that has just issued its latest earnings report, as Wccftech noticed. Profits are booming, unsurprisingly, but SK Hynix also shared its most recent thinking on the RAM crisis, and how likely it is to be a protracted affair.
In the press release for its Q3 2026 results, SK Hynix announced succinctly: “Memory supply shortage to persist through 2030.”
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That was the title of a section briefing us on the memory shortage, where SK Hynix further observed: “The company assessed that supply … is not keeping pace with the growth of the market. Given technical difficulty of leading-edge processes and the long lead time required to build new production facilities, it expects the structure in which demand exceeds supply to persist through 2030.”
The firm also predicted it will sustain its growth and revenue, which exceeded 100 trillion won in Q3 — the first time that’s ever happened in a quarter by the way — thanks to enterprise and AI demand in the shorter-term, and “over the mid-to-long term, demand for physical AI such as autonomous driving and robotics.”
Analysis: a ‘virtuous cycle’ for shareholders – a nightmare for consumers
It’s interesting to note that SK Hynix is forecasting that longer-term demand for memory will be driven by robots or ‘physical AI’ even if software AI (agents) falls away somewhat as the decade rolls to a close. Micron is predicting the exact same thing, and recently went into even more precise detail in estimating that ‘humanoid robots’ could need 200GB (or more) of RAM and multiple terabytes of storage in every unit.
So there’s similar thinking from the big memory module makers here, but we shouldn’t be surprised by that. They need to talk up their future profits, after all, and reassure markets that we aren’t in a bubble, so it’s only natural that they’d want to make predictions of major future revenue sources to be tapped.
Still, there’s clearly some substance to these predictions, and it’s concerning for consumers that a growing number of analysts and big players in the tech industry are talking about the RAM crisis lasting until 2030, and that robots are apparently set to take the baton from AI data centers and push demand for more memory as we head into the next decade.
We can but hope that Micron and SK Hynix are overshooting with their expectations of the hungry robots eating all our RAM in a few years’ time, although how that land lies will depend on how widely robots are adopted, as well as how much memory they’ll need.
Meanwhile, SK Hynix asserts that the “virtuous cycle” which has resulted from AI-powered productivity gains driving increased investment in infrastructure (data centers) will continue, and moreover “broaden to include general enterprises and nation-level initiatives”, the upshot being that the “global AI data center infrastructure market will continue to grow steadily.”
I don’t think many PC owners or gamers feel that the way things have gone with memory of late is all that ‘virtuous’ at all, but the shareholders of SK Hynix and other big chip makers certainly won’t be complaining. They can probably afford themselves a very nice PC even in the current super-inflated component climate, after all.
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Darren Allan
