Samsung has set a date for when we will return to paying “normal” for the memory of our PCs

Samsung has recognizedbluntly, that memory chip shortage Not only will it not subside in the short term, but it will worsen. It did so in its second quarter earnings conference, after its semiconductor division multiplied by more than 250 times its profits compared to 2025, a figure that alone explains why its shares skyrocketed as soon as this news became known.

Jaejune Kim, executive vice president of Samsung’s memory business, was blunt to analysts: the supply shortage will worsen next year and continue into the next. No nuances or ambiguous deadlines: this company manufactures a good part of the memory chips that our computers, mobile phones and servers use, and assumes that this problem has no immediate solution.

However, between the lines Samsung has also dropped a clue about when prices will begin to behave more normally. This is what users are interested in knowing: when will we stop pay outrageous prices by a simple expansion of the RAM of our PC or by an SSD unit, and if we will ever return to the prices before the crisis.

The countdown to normality

Samsung has explained that its long-term supply agreements, signed with the five largest data center companies in the world, will have a minimum duration of five years and will cover between 60% and 70% of its total capacity. There is the first relevant clue: if these contracts start now and extend for five years, the capacity not committed by them (which could be used to supply the consumer market and relieve pressure on memory and storage for PCs) will not begin to be released in a significant way until after that period. In this scenario, 2029 is emerging as the year in which supply could finally get closer to real demand.

It won’t be before. Kim has advanced that a relevant increase in supply cannot be expected in either 2026 or 2027, and that 2028 will continue to be marked by imbalance, so any hint of sustained reduction in memory prices will have to wait until the new factories (the ones Samsung, SK hynix and Micron are building right now) go into full production and until the contracts signed this year reach their natural expiration.

However, we should temper our expectations: just because prices normalize does not mean that they will plummet to pre-crisis levels. And a good part of the manufacturing capacity will continue to be occupied by the high bandwidth memory (HBM) required by the artificial intelligence (IA), which will perpetuate structurally higher demand than just three years ago. What is likely is that when manufacturing capacity manages to match demand, prices will drop to a lower level than the current one, yes, but without even reaching the figures that we considered normal before this memory crisis broke out.

Image | Samsung

More information | Reuters

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