Memory chip prices are out of control! Wall Street re-adjusts expectations: DRAM may surge by 88% in 2026, NAND may surge by 74%

# Source: Wall Street Insights

By Xu Chao

In its latest outlook report, Citigroup has adopted a more aggressively bullish stance than Nomura Securities. Analysts argue that driven by the widespread adoption of AI Agents and the surging demand for memory chips in AI CPUs, memory chip prices are set to witness an **uncontrolled surge** in 2026. The projected year-on-year growth rate of the average selling price (ASP) for DRAM in 2026 has been sharply revised upward from 53% to 88%, while that for NAND has been jacked up from 44% to 74%.

Citigroup has warned that the world will face a **severe supply shortage** of memory chips in 2026.

According to information from Zhuifeng Trading Desk, Citigroup’s latest outlook reflects a more bullish view than Nomura’s. Analysts believe that propelled by the popularization of AI Agents (Artificial Intelligence Agents) and the skyrocketing demand for memory in AI CPUs, memory chip prices will spiral out of control in 2026. They have drastically revised their 2026 ASP growth forecasts: DRAM’s year-on-year growth is lifted from 53% to 88%, and NAND’s from 44% to 74%.

## Pricing Power Shifts Entirely to Sellers

Citigroup’s research team clearly stated in its latest report that the commodity memory market is expected to experience a "severe supply shortage" in 2026. This shortage is not a temporary supply chain disruption, but rather driven by structural data growth. The bank has sharply upgraded its 2026 DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) ASP year-on-year growth forecast from +53% to +88%.

What is even more striking is the data for server DRAM.

Fueled by both AI training and inference demand, Citigroup projects that the ASP of server DRAM will **soar by 144% year-on-year** in 2026, up from the previous forecast of +91%. Take the mainstream 64GB DDR5 RDIMM product as an example: Citigroup predicts its price will hit $620 in Q1 2026, representing a 38% quarter-on-quarter increase, which is far higher than the earlier projection of $518.

In the NAND (flash memory) segment, Citigroup is equally aggressive, raising its 2026 ASP growth forecast from +44% to +74%. Among them, the ASP of enterprise-grade SSDs is expected to surge 87% year-on-year. In the analysts’ view, the market is entering an extremely acute seller’s market, where pricing power will be fully held by memory giants such as Samsung Electronics.

Based on these aggressive price forecasts, Citigroup has substantially revised its earnings outlook for Samsung Electronics. Benefiting from the highly favorable pricing environment, the bank expects Samsung Electronics’ operating profit (OP) to skyrocket to **155 trillion KRW in 2026**, surging 253% year-on-year.

This figure is significantly higher than Citigroup’s previous forecast of 115 trillion KRW. The bank believes that as DRAM and NAND prices surge, Samsung’s profitability will demonstrate exceptional elasticity. In light of this, Citigroup has directly lifted its target price for Samsung Electronics from 170,000 KRW to 200,000 KRW.

## Nomura’s "Super Cycle" vs. Citigroup’s "Extreme Shortage"

Earlier, Nomura put forward the concept of a "triple super cycle" (covering DRAM, NAND and HBM) in its report, predicting that the global memory market size will grow by 98% to $445 billion in 2026.

However, the two institutions hold vastly divergent views on the specific magnitude of price increases.

Nomura forecasts a 46% rise in DRAM prices and a 65% increase in NAND prices in 2026. While these are already substantial gains, Citigroup’s DRAM price growth forecast (88%) is nearly double that of Nomura.

The core of the divergence lies in their differing depth of understanding of demand dynamics.

Nomura emphasizes the "dual resonance" of AI servers and general-purpose servers, as well as the capacity ramp-up of HBM4. In contrast, Citigroup further highlights the incremental data generation brought by "AI Agents", arguing that this will trigger an explosive growth in data volume, thus driving a steeper-than-expected increase in the prices of general-purpose server memory.

## Cleanroom Shortage Becomes a Long-Term Bottleneck

Why will prices spiral so wildly out of control? Beyond the demand explosion, physical constraints on the supply side are another key factor.

Nomura Securities astutely pointed out in its report that the expansion of global memory industry supply is severely constrained by the insufficient availability of **cleanrooms**.

Nomura stressed that even if manufacturers decide to expand production now, due to the cleanroom shortage, substantial supply-side expansion will remain very limited until mid-2027. Furthermore, technology migration (such as the transition to 1C nanometer process) will actually reduce wafer capacity by 10% to 15%, with low initial yields. This means that in the face of the AI data explosion anticipated by Citigroup, the supply side has almost no ability to respond rapidly. This supply-demand mismatch is the fundamental rationale behind Citigroup’s bold forecast of a near-doubling of DRAM prices.

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