SK Chairman Warns Global Memory Shortage Will Last Until 2030
AI's insatiable appetite for memory chips is squeezing out smartphones and PCs, driving prices to record highs — and SK Group's chairman says relief is still four years away.
The next smartphone you buy will cost more. So will your next laptop. And according to the chairman of one of the world's largest chipmakers, that reality will not change before 2030.
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won delivered that warning Wednesday at Nvidia's GTC conference in San Jose, telling reporters that the global memory chip shortage will persist at least through the decade — driven by an artificial intelligence infrastructure boom that is consuming the raw materials the rest of the electronics industry depends on.
Chey made the remarks at the San Jose Convention Center during his first appearance at the annual gathering, where he earlier toured the SK Hynix booth alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The two executives had met in Silicon Valley in February to discuss cooperation on HBM4 memory technology.
The bottleneck, Chey explained, begins at the wafer — the silicon disc from which memory chips are carved. Securing additional wafer supply takes at least four to five years, and he expects the industry-wide supply gap to hold above 20 percent until 2030.
The math is unforgiving. "AI actually wants to have a lot of HBM, and once you make the HBM, we have to use a lot of wafers," Chey told the Straits Times. Every wafer devoted to high-bandwidth memory for AI servers is a wafer that will not become a DRAM chip inside a phone or a PC. Sumit Sadana, business chief at Micron, put the trade-off in concrete terms: "When Micron makes one bit of HBM memory, it forgoes making three bits of conventional memory for other devices."
That trade-off is reshaping the market from the ground up. "This is no longer a cyclical imbalance," said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and chief analyst at Greyhound Research. "It is a structural reallocation of the memory market driven by AI infrastructure economics."
Consumers are already absorbing the cost. Smartphone shipments in 2026 are forecast to fall 12.9 percent to 1.12 billion units — the lowest level in more than a decade — while average selling prices climb 14 percent to an all-time high of $523, according to IDC's February forecast. Francisco Jeronimo, IDC's research lead, stated that "manufacturers will no longer be able to make phones costing less than $100." The era of the budget handset is ending.
"What we are witnessing is not a temporary squeeze, but a tsunami-like shock originating in the memory supply chain, with ripple effects spreading across the entire consumer electronics industry," Jeronimo said.
The price surge is already visible in the data. Memory costs nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the previous quarter, according to Counterpoint Research. DRAM prices alone surged 55 to 60 percent in a single quarter, TrendForce reported.
PCs face the same pressure. DRAM now accounts for 20 to approximately 40 percent of total PC build cost, up sharply from prior norms, IDC said. Goldman analyst Katherine Murphy forecasts PC unit shipments to drop 12 percent to 245 million units in 2026. "In short, there is no return to business as usual for vendors and consumers," said Nabila Popal, senior research director at IDC.
Faster factory expansion offers no escape. Power grids and water supplies — the twin lifeblood of semiconductor fabrication — are strained in every major chipmaking region. "Whether Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, or the United States — securing power and water is difficult everywhere," Chey said. "Expansion is not something that can be done easily just because we want it."
The scale of AI's claim on production is stark. Over 20 percent of global DRAM wafer capacity will serve AI workloads in 2026, IDC said, while overall DRAM and NAND supply growth — at 16 percent and 17 percent year-on-year, respectively — trails the historical rates the industry once took for granted.
SK Hynix sits at the center of this shift. The company holds 57 percent of the global HBM market and 32 percent of the broader DRAM market, according to Counterpoint Research. Chey pledged to work toward price stability, noting that SK Hynix CEO Kwak No-jung will soon announce a plan to stabilize DRAM prices. The company is also weighing a U.S. ADR listing. "I think it would allow the company to gain exposure not only to Korean shareholders but also to U.S. and global investors, allowing us to become a more global company," Chey said.
Some analysts see a narrow window for relief. Shrish Pant, director analyst at Gartner, noted that "some rationalisation in AI infrastructure spending cannot be ruled out, and that traditional DRAM prices could improve by 2028." That is two years sooner than Chey's floor — and still two years away.
The shortage took hold in late 2025 and has shown no sign of easing. The wafers that once fed the world's phones, laptops, and televisions are being redirected to data centers that power AI, and the pipeline to build more runs through years of permitting, construction, and infrastructure strain. For the engineers in San Jose debating the future of artificial intelligence, the economics are thrilling. For the family weighing whether to replace a cracked phone screen or absorb a $523 price tag, they are simply a bill that keeps getting larger.