DRAM and NAND Contract Prices Are Still Rising in Q4 2026

TrendForce projects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise 10–15% quarter over quarter in Q4 2026, while NAND Flash contract prices are expected to increase 15–20%. The forecast was published September 30 and reflects contract-market conditions rather than a guarantee about any specific retail RAM kit or SSD.

The research firm says DRAM suppliers continue to prioritize advanced-process capacity for high-performance server products, keeping the broader market undersupplied. For NAND, AI infrastructure demand is strengthening higher-value enterprise storage even while consumer demand remains comparatively weak.

For PC DRAM, TrendForce says notebook inventories increasingly reflect higher component costs and PC OEMs are still procuring aggressively because they expect supply to remain tight into 2027. The firm also warns that PC DRAM supply could decline next year as more manufacturing capacity shifts toward server applications.

That does not mean desktop DDR5 prices must move by the same 10–15% contract-market forecast. Module inventories, retail competition, regional pricing, product density and timing can all change what consumers actually pay. The useful signal is that upstream conventional DRAM pricing pressure remains positive rather than easing in Q4.

TrendForce describes a split NAND market. PC makers built finished-goods and channel inventory earlier in the year and are reducing SSD capacities in some mainstream systems to control bill-of-material costs. That limits incremental client-SSD procurement and gives NAND suppliers less room to push client pricing as aggressively.

Enterprise SSD demand is much stronger. TrendForce projects enterprise SSD bit demand to grow by more than 80% year over year in 2026 as cloud providers expand AI inference infrastructure, real-time retrieval, caching and vector-database workloads. Most incremental enterprise supply is already committed, and TrendForce expects enterprise SSD price growth to accelerate in Q4.

The notable Q4 pattern is not simply that every memory product is scarce to the same degree. Server DRAM remains undersupplied, graphics-memory output is constrained as suppliers reduce GDDR6 and advanced capacity goes elsewhere, while consumer-facing demand is weaker in notebooks, smartphones and client SSDs.

For PC buyers, that makes actual street pricing more useful than trying to convert one upstream percentage into a purchase deadline. For the industry, however, the forecast reinforces a broader 2026 trend: AI infrastructure is influencing how suppliers allocate DRAM and NAND capacity, and those allocation decisions can indirectly affect consumer components even when end-market PC demand is soft.