Memory price hikes ‘the new normal’ as AI boom fuels storage demand, Seagate says

Memory price hikes are likely to become “the new normal” for the next few years, according to an executive at storage giant Seagate Technology, as the artificial intelligence boom of the past two to three years pushes the industry into what he described as a supercycle.

“It’s hard to tell if it will last forever,” Ban-Seng Teh, Seagate’s chief commercial officer, told the South China Morning Post. The current cycle was “very unusual because in the past we went through cycles of shortage and oversupply”, he said.

The company, which mainly produces hard drives that store data on disks, had “definitely seen increasing costs” due to rising DRAM prices, Teh said, although its own usage of DRAM was “very small” compared with that of computer makers or data-centre operators.

DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory, is a type of chip that allows rapid storage and retrieval of vast amounts of data.

In the first quarter of 2026, prices of server DRAM were expected to surge by around 90 per cent from the previous quarter – the steepest increase on record – according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.

The surge has been fuelled by booming demand from AI data centres, which require far more memory to feed graphics processors used in training and running large language models.

Teh said volatile oil prices driven by turmoil in the Middle East had also had a significant impact. Crude prices briefly surged to nearly US$120 a barrel on Monday, the highest level in four years, before retreating to below US$100.