Counterpoint says global DRAM revenue rose 369% year over year in Q3 2026 to nearly $200 billion on AI data center demand
The 369% increase in revenue figure comes at a time when shipments are up only about 4%, with a price surge doing most of the work
Samsung, SK hynix and Micron booked record profits as phone and PC shipments fell about 20%, and suppliers see tight supply into 2028 and beyond
New figures have claimed the worldwide memory business has posted another incredibly strong quarter as demand continues to rise. Global DRAM revenue jumped 369% year over year in the third quarter of 2026 to just under $200 billion, Counterpoint Research reported , as demand for AI accelerators and data center servers kept supply tight and pushed selling prices to new records. The increase overwhelmingly comes directly from higher prices rather than the volume of memory chips increasing in the market as it struggles to cater to overwhelming AI demand. Same chips, much bigger invoices? A revenue increase due to surging prices is not unusual, but in this market, the gap between the two is unusually narrow: Bit shipments rose only about 4% in the quarter, Counterpoint analyst Jeongku Choi said in comments published by The Register , indicating that the increase in revenue comes at a time when supply remains relatively price inelastic. In a nutshell, this means memory makers are charging a significant premium over previous pricing, even as Counterpoint cites higher average selling prices as the main engine of growth, with the blended DRAM price reaching $1. 90 per gigabit. Choi puts it more bluntly: "AI has turned memory from a commodity into a valuable scarce resource," with buyers now scrambling to secure allocation instead of haggling. The trajectory is steep even by the standards of this cycle. Counterpoint put first-quarter DRAM revenue at $97 billion, up 260% year over year , so the market has roughly doubled again in six months. Counterpoint research director MS Hwang described the per-unit shift in starker terms in an October 28 2026 note on SK hynix’s results , saying DRAM prices that once sat at 20 to 30 cents per gigabit have climbed to about $2 per gigabit, with HBM4 heading toward $4 per gigabit. For scale, Counterpoint’s January 2026 price tracker put the previous supercycle’s 2018 peak at about $1 per gigabit for server modules, so today’s blended average sits close to double that high-water mark, even if the two measures are not a perfect like-for-like comparison, as it skips certain aspects such as surging raw material costs. At the component level, the jump is easier to picture. The contract price of a single 16Gb DDR5 chip climbed from $8. 70 in October 2025 to $48 by September 2026, according to figures cited by Fortune , an increase of more than 450%. What has changed is the pace, not the direction. Counterpoint says increases slowed after the steep run-up of the first half, and TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise a further 10% to 15% quarter over quarter in Q4 . Barclays data shows contract prices up 24% for DDR4 and 20% for DDR5 over the prior three months, and the benchmark DDR4 8Gb PC chip set another record in October at $27. 50, up 5. 8% on September, according to DRAMeXchange data . Interestingly, NAND is a different story: the 128Gb MLC benchmark held flat at $30. 61, ending a 21-month run of back-to-back increases. Some in the channel think the top is near. Transcend chairman Peter Shu expects DRAM and NAND prices to level off , seeing limited room for further increases but little chance of declines. TrendForce sees the opposite risk, saying in a November 6 report that DRAM price increases should gain further momentum in the first quarter of 2027 . It is important to note that almost no one in the supply chain is forecasting a fall. A switch to consumer-grade components?…