In its monthly press release today, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that the semiconductor market had already hit the amazing $1 trillion mark for 2026 even before the end of the third quarter. SIA announced that August semiconductor sales, as compiled by WSTS, hit $159.7 billion, an increase of 144.3% over August 2025’s $65.4 billion.
For some years the industry has been Continue reading “Semis Hit $1 Trillion in Under 3 Quarters!”
Scale economies are an essential component to the success of a memory manufacturer, yet The Memory Guy finds that very few executives in the industry truly understand them. This mechanism may be the single most important issue in introducing a new memory technology to the market.
In this post I will Continue reading “Understanding the Economies of Scale”
An associate recently directed The Memory Guy to a short but interesting article published last March in Korea’s Chosen Daily called: Micron’s cautious EUV strategy raises questions on future DRAM edge. As the headline promises, the article questions Micron’s decision to postpone using EUV to make DRAM until its 1-gamma process node, which is now in mass production.
It’s particularly interesting to Continue reading “When Should DRAM Makers Adopt EUV?”
DDR4 spot prices have been surging since March. Why is that happening, and what can we understand from it? The Memory Guy thought it might be helpful to chart what has happened with DDR4 and DDR5 spot prices to better understand that.
The chart below plots the lowest spot prices of tested DDR4 and DDR5 DRAMs of any Continue reading “Some Clarity on 2025’s DDR4 Price Surge”
On April 2nd SNIA hosted a CXL webinar to discuss where the technology currently is, and where it is headed. The Memory Guy was honored to play a part in this event.
Other speakers were Arthur Sainio, on behalf of SNIA, Mahesh Natu, on behalf of the CXL Consortium, and Torry Steed of SMART Modular, a company that has been one of the earliest providers of Continue reading “SNIA CXL Webinar Available On-Demand”
If you didn’t realize that Kioxia finally held its Initial Public Offering (IPO) on 16 December, 2024, you are in the majority. The IPO was held a couple of days before initially planned on the Tokyo Stock Exchange where Kioxia is traded as number 285a.
The event was barely covered by the press outside of Japan, and Kioxia only Continue reading “Kioxia’s Barely-Noticed IPO”
One of the biggest markets fueling today’s memory growth is hyperscale computing. Not just hyperscale computing the way that it’s always been, but hyperscale computing fueled by AI spending.
The Memory Guy decided that this might be a good time to investigate whether a market anomaly might be driving this growth — something that could change at some point to cause Continue reading “Hyperscaler CapEx Significantly Off-Trend”
The Micron earnings call today (25 September, 2025) highlighted the company’s continuing strength in the memory business, and Micron’s management shared expectations for the market to remain strong through the end of calendar 2025. In this post The Memory Guy will share a bit of the information that Objective Analysis typically reserves for its paying clientele.
In brief, Micron’s end markets are Continue reading “Micron’s Earnings Reveal Continuing Market Strength”
The memory business is currently faring pretty well. DRAM spot prices have been relatively stable for more than a year, and NAND flash spot prices, although down 20% from their spring peak, are still 2½ times their mid-2023 trough.
The business is definitely off-trend, though, and that means that Continue reading “How Long Will Memory Growth Continue?”
Something that The Memory Guy tries to do is to find other industries that travel down the same path as memory chips, or, better yet, industries that have already traveled down that path and can share the difficulties they have encountered along the way. Perhaps we can learn something from other industries that will make our own job a little easier. Maybe we can avoid certain difficulties that have afflicted those other industries, simply by knowing in advance that we are Continue reading “How the Tragedy of the Commons Impacts Memory”
