Samsung Says the Memory Crunch Lasts Until 2028 - So When Do You Upgrade?

If you've been putting off a PC upgrade because "prices will surely settle down next year", one of the few companies that would actually know just told you to stop waiting for that.

Samsung, which produces roughly a third of the world's memory supply, said in its latest earnings call that supply will remain constrained through 2027 while demand keeps climbing, and that it expects the squeeze to last until at least 2028. That's not a rumour or an analyst guess - that's the manufacturer itself, as reported by TechCrunch and picked up by Eurogamer. And yes, the same earnings call showed Samsung is doing very nicely out of the whole thing. Shortages are miserable for buyers and lucrative for the three companies that control the memory market.

On top of that, AMD is reportedly preparing to raise prices on its graphics cards and memory, right after Nvidia did the same. According to industry reports, AMD deliberately waited for Nvidia to move first so it wouldn't risk losing market share by hiking alone. Read that again: the two GPU rivals aren't competing on price right now, they're taking turns raising it. There's no downward pressure coming from anywhere.

What does that mean for a normal player in our region, where a GPU already eats a bigger chunk of a salary than it does in Germany or the UK? A few sober thoughts. First, memory is in everything - graphics cards, SSDs, consoles, phones - so this isn't just a "PC builder problem". Second, if your machine genuinely needs an upgrade now, waiting six months for a dip probably won't pay off this time; the manufacturer itself is telling you the dip isn't scheduled before 2028. Third, if your setup still runs what you play, the smartest move is the boring one: skip the cycle entirely and let this generation pass you by.

And the second-hand market just got more valuable. Used RAM is one of the safer used components you can buy - it either works or it doesn't, and it's easy to test. In a period like this, local classifieds are a legitimate upgrade path, not a compromise.

What bothers me most isn't the shortage itself - cycles happen. It's that a handful of companies are posting record results during a "crisis" and calmly telling us it'll last three more years. You and I can't fix the memory oligopoly. What we can do is stop feeding it with FOMO upgrades we didn't actually need.

Image: Mister rf / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F11636S.jpg