While end customers grapple with crushing memory prices, we imagine Samsung execs are breaking out the Champagne. This week the memory titan forecast fourth-quarter operating profit would roughly triple as the South Korean electronics cabal rides the AI wave into the New Year.

In a financial disclosure published Thursday, Samsung predicted Q4 operating profits would come in at $13.77 billion (20 trillion won), up from $4.4 billion (6.49 trillion won) a year ago. Meanwhile, Samsung expects revenues to grow by approximately 23 percent year over year to $64 billion (93 trillion won).

Samsung is one of the leading producers of NAND flash and DRAM memory, prices for which have exploded over the past few months as inventory levels have been strained by intense demand for AI accelerators and servers.

Memory prices are expected to continue climbing sharply over the next few quarters. This is bad news for consumers but great news for memory vendors like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron's bottom lines.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that Samsung and SK Hynix could hike prices by as much as 70 percent in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Combined with a 50 percent price hike in the latter half of 2025, that means buyers can expect to pay more than twice what they did for the same memory a year ago.

Making matters worse for the average Joe just looking to grab some DDR5 for their PC, all three of the major memory vendors have reallocated resources and capacity away from consumer products to more lucrative server DRAM and HBM used in AI systems. As you may recall, just a few weeks ago, Micron killed off its Crucial brand of consumer SSDs and memory modules.

According to TechInsights, DRAM prices won't peak until at least 2026. And, unlike past memory boom-bust cycles where prices eventually cratered within a year or two of this happening, analysts don't expect this to be the case.

Instead, they expect prices to remain fairly flat through 2027, before rising again in 2028 as GPU and AI ASIC builders transition from HBM4 to HBM4e memory.

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While AI is definitely at fault for much of this, timing is also a factor. Memory pricing is incredibly volatile and when the AI boom hit, the memory market had just gone bust. That is to say, inventories were high and demand was low. This meant there wasn't money to build fabs.

With the cash flowing in, this is changing. Micron this week said it will break ground on its New York megafab project on January 16. Unfortunately, fabs are enormously complex and expensive projects that often require three to four years to bring online, so don't expect Micron or any other new fab projects announced going forward to offer any relief. We're in this for the long haul. ®