TrendForce, a technology market research firm, says the DRAM memory chip industry took in nearly $154.73 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 59.5 percent from the first quarter, as contract prices for memory chips rose sharply while shipment volumes grew only modestly. Samsung led with $60.98 billion of that revenue, up 63.4 percent, followed by SK Hynix at $38.59 billion, up 37.9 percent, and Micron at $36.0 billion, up 65.5 percent. DRAM is the memory that computers and AI servers use to hold data they are actively working on. For anyone buying a computer, a phone or anything else with memory chips inside it, these are the price rises TrendForce describes.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has issued its five-year plan for the information and communications sector, according to the state news agency Xinhua, which lists thirteen main indicators for 2030 including intelligent computing power of 9,800 EFLOPS and cumulative investment in information infrastructure of 3.8 trillion yuan. An EFLOPS is a unit of computing speed, a billion billion calculations per second. The tier is Reported because the ministry's own document could not be read; Xinhua's Chinese text carries the figures in one sentence with the 2030 horizon. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is a target in a planning document.
China's Ministry of Commerce says in a preliminary ruling that imports of dichlorosilane from Japan are being dumped, that is, sold below a fair price, and that the domestic industry has suffered material injury as a result. Dichlorosilane is a gas used to deposit thin films during chip manufacturing. From 8 September, the ministry says, importers must lodge cash deposits with Chinese customs at company-specific rates: 99.2 percent for Shin-Etsu Chemical, 80.8 percent for Denal Silane and 99.2 percent for other Japanese companies. This is a provisional measure, not a final duty. For an ordinary person nothing changes; it is a trade action on an industrial input.
American markets were closed for a holiday, so Asia was the only place trading. The shares that rose most were memory chip makers, not the famous AI names. Memory is where AI demand shows up first, because every AI machine needs far more of it than an ordinary computer.
Ireland's energy regulator worked out that seventeen planned data centres would burn as much gas as 2.6 million households. Its answer is to sell them cheaper gas on the condition that supply can be cut off in a cold snap. No regulator has tried that before.