In an impressive display of solidarity in one of the most hotly competitive and profitable tech industries, the three major memory makers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, are jointly investigating their customers to prevent memory hoarding, according to Nikkei Asia. They’re asking customers to disclose their own customers and order volumes to ensure that no one is hoarding more memory than they need, exacerbating memory supply problems.
The immediate impact of this may well be to accelerate price increases for consumer devices. After all, if a company can’t buy cheaper memory now, it could be more expensive to buy it later. But this may help give memory makers the confidence they need to effectively invest in increased production, and it might just give smaller customers a chance to compete fairly.
Fool me twice… you can’t fool me again
Samsung Electronics Co. P5 semiconductor plant in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea (Image credit: Getty / Bloomberg)
Since memory demand started skyrocketing in 2025, memory makers have been inundated with calls to increase supply while brands panic-bought what was available. Ramping up production lines and retooling fabs is required, but it’s not that easy. NAND flash, particularly the newest and most capable chips, uses cutting-edge facilities, and those manufacturing lines take years to bring online.
Production can and is being increased, but the required investment for such an endeavour is enormous. Though the potential upsides are excellent – increased supply should mean the memory makers can sell more in turn – the potential downsides are there too. Most notably, if supply and demand equalize, any industry changes could swing the ratio in the other direction, leaving the memory companies oversupplied and competing with each other to sell what they have.
This isn’t some theorized scenario, either. It’s already happened, which is why Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are twice shy about increasing production.
During the pandemic, as everyone rushed to buy desktops and laptops to work from home, memory was once again in short supply, and the memory makers scrambled to catch up. They invested in new facilities, taped out new production lines, and pivoted the enterprise to adjust to a new world where memory wasn’t plentiful.
But it wasn’t to last. Just a few years later, as demand started to fall, problems arose. Because during those pandemic months and years, customers of the major memory manufacturers overbooked and built up stockpiles of their own, they didn’t continue to replace them when their own orders dwindled. By the end of 2022, memory sales had dropped by almost a third, and revenue was crashing right behind it as the going price for memory cratered.
This led to companies like Samsung actually cutting production of its 3D NAND and DRAM products. Although it claimed to be continuing R&D expansion and infrastructure building, it wasn't on the same scale as it would have been had orders remained strong. SK Hynix followed suit several months later, and those cuts continued throughout 2023 across a range of companies.
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