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The IT industry has had both memory shortages and gluts many times before, so there’s an understandable reluctance to get carried away when it comes to memory shortages because, for the most part, they sort themselves out. But perhaps things won’t be quite so simple this time around. In December, IDC published Global memory shortage crisis: market analysis & the potential impact on the smartphone and PC markets in 2026, which warned: “The memory market is at an unprecedented inflexion point, with demand materially outpacing supply. For an industry that has long been characterised by boom-and-bust cycles, this time is different.” The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and workloads has exerted significant pressure on the memory ecosystem, shifting manufacturing capacity away from consumer electronics toward high-margin memory solutions to support AI. This led to restricted supply of general-purpose memory modules and drove up prices across the board. IDC noted that the timing of the memory shortage “...