A report recently released by Goldman Sachs pointed out that the global memory market will experience one of the most serious supply shortages in history from 2026 to 2027, with the supply and demand gaps in the three major categories of DRAM, NAND and HBM all expanding significantly.Among them, the DRAM gap in 2026 will be the highest in 15 years, and the NAND shortage will also reach a historical high. Even if the demand for consumer electronics drops sharply, the crazy devouring power of the server market will still maintain a tense situation.
In terms of DRAM, Goldman Sachs predicts that the supply shortage of DRAM will reach 4.9% and 2.5% in 2026 and 2027, far exceeding the previous expectations of 3.3% and 1.1%. The supply shortage in 2026 will be the most serious in the past 15 years.
The main reason is the explosive growth of server demand. Goldman Sachs has raised its forecast for server DRAM (excluding HBM) demand by 6%/10% in 2026/2027, which is expected to reach 39% and 22% respectively.
If HBM is included, server-related DRAM demand will account for 53% and 57% of the total global demand.
The NAND market is also not optimistic. It is expected that NAND supply will exceed demand by 4.2%/2.1% in 2026/2027. This will be one of the largest shortages in the history of the NAND industry.
The demand for enterprise-level SSD is the main reason. Goldman Sachs has raised its forecast for enterprise-level SSD demand by 14%/14% in 2026/2027, with the growth rate expected to reach 58%/23%, and its share of global NAND demand will rise to 36%/39%.
As for the mobile and PC sides, mobile NAND demand is expected to see zero growth for the first time in 2026, and the PC side is also expected to see zero growth in 2026, both reaching historically low levels.
As for HBM, which is indispensable in the AI field, Goldman Sachs has raised its market size to US$75 billion in 2027. Although Samsung and SK Hynix have expanded production at full speed, they still cannot keep up with the growth rate of demand for GPU and ASIC chips.The supply-demand gap is expected to remain high at 5.1% and 4.0% in the past two years.
