Storage chip prices out of control! Wall Street revises forecasts: DRAM may surge 88% and NAND 74% by 2026

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Citi warns that in 2026, the world will face a “severe supply shortage” of memory chips.

According to information from Trading Desk, Citi presents a far more aggressive bullish stance than Nomura Securities in its latest outlook. Analysts believe that, driven by the widespread adoption of AI Agents and a surge in AI CPU memory demand, memory chip prices will see an uncontrollable surge in 2026. The analysts have violently raised the expected ASP increase for DRAM in 2026 from 53% to 88%, and for NAND from 44% to 74%.

Pricing Power Completely Tilts Toward Sellers

Citi’s research team clearly points out in the latest report that the commodity memory market is expected to see a “severe supply shortage” in 2026. This shortage is not a temporary supply chain disturbance but is driven by structural data growth. Citi sharply raised its expectation for year-on-year ASP growth of DRAM in 2026 from +53% to +88%.

Even more shocking are the numbers for server DRAM.

Citi forecasts that, driven by the dual demands of AI training and inference, the ASP of server DRAM in 2026 will surge 144% year-on-year (previously predicted: +91%). For mainstream products like 64GB DDR5 RDIMM, Citi projects its price will reach $620 in Q1 2026, a quarter-on-quarter increase of 38%, far higher than the previous estimate of $518.

In the NAND (flash memory) sector, Citi is equally aggressive, raising its expected ASP growth for 2026 from +44% to +74%. Among them, the ASP of enterprise SSDs is expected to grow 87% year-on-year. In the analysts’ view, the market is entering an extremely dramatic seller’s market, with pricing power completely in the hands of memory giants like Samsung.

Based on these aggressive price predictions, Citi has significantly revised Samsung Electronics’ profit outlook. Citi expects, benefiting from an extremely favorable pricing environment, that Samsung Electronics’ operating profit (OP) in 2026 will soar to 155 trillion KRW, a rise of 253% year-on-year.

This figure far exceeds Citi’s previous estimate of 115 trillion KRW. Citi believes that as DRAM and NAND prices surge, Samsung’s profitability will show strong resilience. Consequently, Citi has directly raised Samsung Electronics’ target price from 170,000 KRW to 200,000 KRW.

Nomura’s “Supercycle” vs. Citi’s “Extreme Shortage”

Previously Nomura proposed the concept of a “triple supercycle” (DRAM, NAND, HBM) in its report, forecasting that the global memory market will grow 98% to $445 billion in 2026.

However, the two institutions diverge sharply regarding the expected price increases.

Nomura forecasts a 46% increase for DRAM prices and 65% for NAND in 2026. While this is already a significant increase, Citi’s DRAM increase forecast (88%) is nearly twice that of Nomura.

The core difference lies in the depth of understanding of demand.

Nomura highlights the “dual resonance” of AI servers and general-purpose servers as well as HBM4’s production ramp-up; whereas Citi emphasizes incremental data generation from “AI Agents”, seeing this as resulting in explosive data growth and leading to a steeper than expected price increase for general server memory.

Cleanroom Shortage Becomes a Long-Term Bottleneck

Why are prices so out of control? Beyond exploding demand, physical limitations on the supply side are another key factor.

Nomura keenly points out in its report that global memory industry supply expansion is severely constrained by “cleanroom” availability.

Nomura stresses that even if vendors decide to expand production now, due to cleanroom shortages, substantial supply increases will be very limited before mid-2027. Additionally, technology migration (such as transition to 1C nanometer processes) actually reduces wafer output by 10% to 15%, with initially low yields. This means that, faced with the AI data explosion anticipated by Citi, the supply side almost has no capacity to respond quickly. This supply-demand mismatch is the fundamental logic behind Citi’s prediction of a doubling in DRAM prices.

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