The world's three big memory chip makers post their strongest quarter in years as prices surge

A market research firm's count of DRAM sales shows the price pressure already visible in Nvidia's margins and Amazon's capex is larger than those numbers alone suggested.

7 September 2026 · 4 min read

What happened

TrendForce, a Taiwan-based 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. DRAM is the short-term memory that computers, phones and AI servers use to hold the data they are actively working on, and contract prices for it have been climbing sharply all year as AI data centres buy up supply.

Samsung led the quarter with $60.98 billion of that revenue, up 63.4 percent, and a 39.4 percent share of the market. SK Hynix followed at $38.59 billion, up 37.9 percent, with a 24.9 percent share. Micron came third at $36.0 billion, up 65.5 percent, and a 23.3 percent share. All three companies grew faster than 35 percent in a single quarter, an unusually fast move for an industry this large.

Why it matters

This did not appear out of nowhere. Nvidia told investors in August that memory costs were pushing its own gross margin down to a floor of 71 to 72 percent. Amazon told investors in July it was raising its 2026 capital spending plan to $220 billion and attributed the entire increase to memory. Those two numbers were symptoms, visible from the buyers' side; TrendForce's report points to the underlying cause on the sellers' side. TrendForce says the increase was driven mainly by contract prices, not by shipping more chips: it states plainly that "DRAM bit shipments grew only modestly in the second quarter" while contract prices rose sharply. TrendForce also projects price growth will slow to 13 to 18 percent quarter over quarter in the third quarter, still growth, just at a gentler pace, though that is TrendForce's own forecast rather than a confirmed fact.

What would change it, and when

New memory manufacturing capacity coming online would ease the price pressure, but building a new fab or converting existing production lines to advanced memory takes years, not months. Until new supply lands, buyers with the most money, largely AI companies and the hyperscalers that serve them, are likely to keep winning the memory that exists.

What we do not know

TrendForce does not break out, in anything we read directly, how much of each individual company's revenue growth came from price versus the modest volume increase it describes for the industry as a whole, so we cannot say how the price and volume effects split between Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron specifically. We also do not know how long current AI-driven demand holds if some AI companies are financing their compute purchases with debt rather than cash on hand, a pattern documented elsewhere in this stack.

What this changes for you

For anyone buying a laptop, a phone, a car with onboard computers, or anything else with memory chips inside it, this is the same price pressure currently landing on AI companies' margins, working its way toward the shelf.

Sources

Everything above is written from these. Each line says what that document proves.

1. trendforce.com: TrendForce's own report: total DRAM industry revenue and each of Samsung's, SK Hynix's and Micron's individual revenue and market share for the quarter.
2. fool.com: Nvidia's own Q2 FY2027 earnings call transcript, already published on the site at /pulse/2026-08-26: memory costs pushing gross margin to a 71 to 72 percent floor.
3. investing.com: Amazon's own Q2 2026 earnings call transcript, already published on the site at /pulse/2026-07-30: the 2026 capex raise to $220bn, attributed entirely to memory.