Apparently, some idiots have suddenly started dumping memory stocks because of this post I made…
Yes, I posted it to warn people not to underestimate YMTC. But that doesn’t mean I was telling anyone to panic-sell.
NAND is still in short supply, and that shortage will persist.
NVIDIA’s CMX racks are currently so constrained by NAND shortages that they cannot even be shipped fully populated. Customers looking to purchase CMX racks are reportedly being asked to source some of the NAND themselves to fill the racks.
I’m not a NAND bear—let me be absolutely clear about that. YMTC is still heavily exposed to the consumer market, and it should not be underestimated. But that does not mean YMTC is going to push the NAND market into oversupply.
Memory market update:
- Counterpoint forecast a 20% QoQ increase for DRAM.
- Trendforce are more conservative at 13-18% for conventional DRAM and 10-15% for NAND.
- Morgan Stanley raised Q3 PC DRAM forecast to 15-20% increases QoQ from 3-8%.
These aren't perfectly comparable baskets but the main conclusion is that tightness still persists.
SK Hynix CEO and Chairman both confirmed supply tightness post-US IPO, potentially into the 2030s.
- Samsung is reportedly seeking a Q3 DRAM ASP increase of up to 20% QoQ, with LPDDR increases potentially exceeding 20%.
That would be their third consecutive quarterly hike after +90% in Q1 and +60% in Q2. This is above TrendForce's forecast but if price increases stick, $MU and SK hynix would likely follow.
- TrendForce expects Q3 server DRAM contract prices to rise 13-18%.
Multi year supply agreements limit price increases for some large volume US cloud customers. Which means customers without LTAs and incremental volumes sold outside those agreements would absorb the largest hikes.
- SK hynix reportedly plan to scrap price caps in its new LTAs so that spot upside flows straight through, while $MU's SCAs carry floors and ceilings.
- TrendForce estimates HBM will consume 22% of the top three suppliers' DRAM wafer input in 2026 while producing only 9% of DRAM bits.
Those figures rise to 30% & 13% in 2027. This disproportionate wafer consumption is the main structural reason why conventional / server DRAM can remain scarce, even as capex increases.
- On HBM4 itself, 2027 contract negotiations land around Q4'26 and Digitimes model HBM4 moving from ~$2/Gb in 2H26 toward $4-5/Gb next year.
- Morgan Stanley suggest NAND remains undersupplied through 2027.
- TrendForce expects mature SLC NAND pricing to rise 120-170% in 2H26, driven by shrinking mature-node capacity & MLC -> SLC migration.
Positive read-through for $SNDK, Kioxia and $MU, while $SIMO offers controller leverage.
- Worth noting Kioxia has filed for a US ADS listing, and $SNDK has raised NAND product pricing double digits while extending the JV with Kioxia to 2034.
- $MU also recently broke ground on a ¥1.5 trillion Hiroshima expansion, targeting advanced DRAM & HBM shipments around summer 2028.
UBS: $MU COULD REPURCHASE MORE THAN 40% OF ITS SHARES BY THE END OF 2028
UBS expects Micron to generate over $40 billion in free cash flow through 2028. Once its buyback restriction expires on December 9, 2026, the company could potentially use that cash to repurchase more than 40% of its shares at the current price.
Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore said that, after speaking with several purchasing contacts in the data center space last week, the intensity of the memory shortages shows no signs of abating. He added that prices appear to be up at least 25% on a like-for-like basis from 2Q to 3Q.
This is above both Morgan Stanley’s and third-party estimates.
Moore also noted that longer-term concerns that the memory shortage will intensify in 2027 and again in 2028 remain as strong as ever. Morgan Stanley added that there is not enough memory relative to AI requirements and that it does not see this situation changing.
Notable quotes:
“Cloud customers are paying premiums to the expected 2Q price for six-week expedites; do we think those customers are paying those premia to stockpile memory in a warehouse?”
“AI is consuming so much DRAM that there isn’t enough left over for other sectors, and everywhere we look, we see indications that it is a true bottleneck. It’s holding back PC builds and smartphone builds.”
“Memory is not just constrained by AI demand—memory is increasingly one of the major primary constraints on AI demand, along with space and power.”
$MU $SKHY $SNDK
U.S. EYES TOUGHER CURBS ON CHINESE AI
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS REPORTEDLY CONSIDERING STRICTER RULES ON CHINESE AI MODELS AFTER THE LAUNCH OF MOONSHOT AI’S KIMI K3. OPTIONS INCLUDE REQUIRING U.S. HOSTING PROVIDERS TO GUARANTEE THE SECURITY OF CHINESE MODELS AND ACCEPT LIABILITY FOR BREACHES, ALONGSIDE POTENTIAL PROCUREMENT BANS AND EXPORT BLACKLIST MEASURES, AS WASHINGTON RESPONDS TO CHINA’S RAPID AI ADVANCES.
“Nvidia’s CMX is equipped with 576 SSDs, providing a total storage capacity of 9,600 TB. Industry estimates suggest that NAND demand for CMX will surge from 35 million TB this year to more than 100 million TB next year.”
Nvidia’s Rubin CMX will quite literally soak up NAND supply like a sponge absorbs water. To put 100 million TB into perspective, it is roughly equivalent to adding another Apple-sized source of demand to the NAND market.
Some observations on Kimi:
1. It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that. In agentic coding sessions, it seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seemed very token hungry. It's not obvious to me that this model is actually that cheap to run.
2. I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. To be clear, I *myself* might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I am surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference (making China's open-weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls) and the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. For the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind, and they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China.
3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. I suspect the reason they are is that they know open-weight models are effectively ungovernable, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open-weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy; it reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the hill people in "the art of not being governed." Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.
6. It's probably true that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'll really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough that you will notice. "A nonliving, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab," you say? Color me shocked.