The global technology industry is experiencing drastic structural changes triggered by the demand for artificial intelligence (AI). In this regard, Gou Jiazhang, general manager of Huirong Technology, a memory IC design manufacturer, said that becau...
The global technology industry is experiencing drastic structural changes triggered by the demand for artificial intelligence (AI). In this regard, Gou Jiazhang, general manager of Huirong Technology, a memory IC design manufacturer, said that because the authenticity and intensity of the demand for AI training and inference exceed expectations, the AI industry will never experience a bubble crisis in the short term.
Gou Jiazhang said that the development of AI will definitely not form a bubble in the short term because its demand intensity is very high. The demand is not limited to high-end training, but also begins to spread to the enterprise side, and gradually affects the consumer side. Among them, the take-off of inference is regarded as the biggest driving force for the future storage market.
Gou Jiazhang’s analysis pointed out that in this wave of AI, memory and storage components are facing an extremely short supply situation, including serious shortages of HBM (high bandwidth memory) and DRAM, of which HBM is extremely out of stock. Since the demand for memory in the market is "must use", even Samsung's HBM4 and DDR4 have received a large number of orders. Major technology companies such as Apple are working hard to allocate production capacity in 2026, and they may not even be able to get the full amount. At present, the market has reached the stage of "as long as the goods are available", and price negotiations have almost come to a standstill.
Secondly, the price of NAND Flash has skyrocketed. The reason is that due to sharp price increases and continued shortages, memory manufacturers remain cautious about increasing production capacity to avoid a recurrence of the market disastrous conditions in 2022 and 2023. Next comes the return of low capacity and the rise of QLC. Gou Jiazhang pointed out that the soaring price of memory has directly affected the specifications of consumer electronics products. With the cost approaching the price of mobile application processors (APs), in regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia, mobile phones that have been mainstreamed to 128GB capacity have begun to appear in low-end models with 64GB.
Finally, QLC technology is accelerating its popularity. This is in response to the cost pressure brought about by rising NAND prices. The growth rate of QLC will accelerate and become the most important technology to deal with storage shortages. It is estimated that global QLC bit shipments (bit) are likely to surpass TLC in 2027. In addition, some even believe that this turning point may occur in 2028 or 2029. Although there are concerns in the market about manufacturers over-ordering, the general consensus in the industry is that there will definitely be a shortage of goods by 2026, and no one even dares to predict the situation in 2027.
As for the continuous shortage in quantity, Gou Jiazhang believes that the price of memory will not continue to rise to the sky. After all, too high a price will eventually cause a shrinking of market demand. Each supplier will try to avoid such a hard situation, so prices will not almost always rise. However, when this happens will still depend on the market supply and demand conditions as the key point.
