Market forecasts put global semiconductor revenue this year at $1.6 trillion, up 92 percent from a year earlier. Memory revenue of $837 billion would exceed 50 percent of total industry sales for the first time.

Artificial intelligence data center investment is driving the increase. As cloud providers keep expanding capacity, demand has risen simultaneously for high bandwidth memory, server RDIMMs and high-capacity storage.

Supply has not kept pace. As manufacturers shift capacity toward higher-value products, memory for phones, PCs, vehicles and consumer devices is being squeezed out.

The shortage is not expected to end quickly. DRAM tightness may not ease until the second half of 2027 or 2028, while the NAND flash shortfall could run into the first half of next year.

Higher prices pass through to finished goods. As memory takes a larger share of the cost of smartphones and laptops, consumer prices are affected too.

The next projection is larger still. One forecast has the memory market crossing $1 trillion in 2027 and lifting total semiconductor revenue to $1.9 trillion, though such projections rest on the assumption that the pace of AI investment holds.