Micron Expects Global Memory Chip Shortage to Persist Beyond 2027

Micron Technology expects the global memory chip supply shortage to persist beyond 2027, driven by relentless demand from artificial intelligence that continues to outpace the industry's ability to add manufacturing capacity. Sumit Sadana, Micron's Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer, outlined the company's outlook at the KeyBanc Capital Markets Annual Technology Leadership Forum, stating that customer demand signals have increased since the company's latest earnings report, making calendar year 2027 expected to be even tighter than 2026.

The primary constraint for customers is DRAM, not power availability, real estate, datacenter capacity, or logic wafers, Sadana said. He attributed the imbalance to the difficulty and lengthy time required to construct and ramp leading-edge memory fabrication plants. The current environment is fundamentally different from prior memory cycles, he noted, citing the expansion of generative AI, agentic AI, and future artificial general intelligence applications. Agentic AI workloads can require five to 30 times more tokens than comparable chat-interface tasks, with deep-reasoning workloads requiring still more, increasing the need...