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Lenovo Says The 'RAMageddon' Is The New Normal, Outlines Survival Guide
At ISC 2026 An Exec Said 'It Will Never Be Like It Was Last Year'
EDITORS: THIS HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY SOFTWARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT - THE CONTENT MAY REQUIRE EXTENSIVE EDITING
That comes to us by way of our German friends over at ComputerBase, who note that "never" was said with a smirk, thus implying that it wasn't meant to be taken literally. Instead, the message from Lenovo is that memory prices were unusually low in early 2025, and it will be a long time before we see comparatively low prices [tomshardware.com] on RAM, flash memory, and other components, as the #1 worldwide PC OEM expects AI demand to continue growing.
The report points to SK hynix's recently announced plans to triple its memory production capacity by 2034 as supporting evidence. Lenovo's reasoning is straightforward: the notoriously profit-hungry [tomshardware.com] memory manufacturers would be unlikely to invest so heavily in expanding production if they expected a return to the razor-thin margins and oversupply that characterized parts of the market in early 2025.
In case you needed extra evidence for its argument, Lenovo also suggested that memory capacity itself is becoming an increasingly important consideration when designing and purchasing servers. While vendors have traditionally advertised the maximum supported memory capacity of new platforms, actually populating those DIMM slots has become far more expensive. New dual-socket servers [tomshardware.com] are on the way next year [tomshardware.com] with 16 memory channels per processor, meaning that even a relatively modest configuration can require around 1 TB of installed memory to fully utilize the available bandwidth.
Even companies that traditionally wield enormous purchasing power are feeling the squeeze. Apple reportedly has [tomshardware.com] sought permission from the U.S. government to source DRAM from Chinese memory maker CXMT, a Pentagon-blacklisted company, illustrating just how valuable additional memory supply has become as prices continue to climb. At the same time, memory vendors are enjoying some of the strongest pricing power (and profit margins [tomshardware.com]) they've seen in years, giving them little incentive to accelerate a return to the boom-and-bust pricing cycles that once defined the DRAM market.
Ironically, one consequence of the ongoing memory shortage is that HBM is becoming more economically attractive relative to conventional system memory. DRAM manufacturers have redirected significant production capacity [tomshardware.com] toward higher-margin HBM for AI accelerators, reducing the supply of commodity DDR5 and LPDDR5 while demand for both remains elevated. As a result, the premium for HBM-backed computing has narrowed, not because HBM has become inexpensive, but because traditional system memory has become dramatically more expensive. Hyperscalers were going to buy the GPUs anyway, so maximizing their utilization to reduce DDR5 requirements suddenly becomes an attractive proposition.
That shift helps explain Lenovo's suggestion that GPU-accelerated computing may now make more financial sense for some workloads. If an application can keep much of its working set in GPU-attached HBM, it may require significantly less DDR5 installed in the host system. With system DRAM now representing a much larger share [tomshardware.com] of overall server cost than it did just a year ago, reducing memory capacity requirements can materially lower the price of deploying large-scale infrastructure.
Obviously, we don't know whether Lenovo's long-term outlook will prove accurate, but memory pricing has historically been cyclical, with periods of oversupply often followed by sharp corrections. With hyperscalers continuing to pour billions [tomshardware.com] into AI infrastructure and memory vendors increasingly prioritizing high-margin enterprise products, the company believes the unusually inexpensive DRAM and NAND prices of 2024 and early 2025 may prove to have been an anomaly.
