DRAM Prices Will Increase Up To 53% In 2024 & Another 35% in 2025 As Memory Industry Delivers Record Revenue Growth

The demand for DRAM memory & NAND flash is at its peak and is expected to increase revenue by up to 77% while also resulting in higher prices.

The AI boom is not stopping any time soon and with more companies leveraging AI capabilities through modern hardware, it's no surprise that the effect is clear on the hardware demand. Up until now, you may have heard about NVIDIA's plan to limit RTX 40 GPU supply to focus on the Blackwell lineup but today, it's evident that DRAM and NAND Flash memories are also seeing the highest demand in recent years.

According to TrendForce, it's expected that the demand for both DRAM and NAND Flash memories will be at an all-time high, with the DRAM revenue expected to hit a whopping $90.7 billion by the end of 2024. The NAND Flash memory is also estimated to grow to $67.4 billion, an increase of 77% year-over-year in revenue. DRAM revenue can reach up to a 75% increase in y-o-y revenue versus 2023 but isn't looking to drop anytime soon.

Even though the year-on-year revenue increase isn't expected to grow at the same rate the next year, 2025 will still see a significant rise in the demand and revenue by around 51% in the DRAM department and up to 29% in NAND Flash. It's expected that the DRAM revenue can hit $136,488B by 2025 while the NAND Flash memory revenue will stay at around $87B.

One of the core reasons for such a high revenue generation is HBM memory, which is one of the most expensive in the industry. However, HBM is not going to be responsible for more than 5% of the total shipments while generating as much as 20% of revenue from the total DRAM revenue in 2024 alone.

Another major contributing factor to this revenue increase is the DDR5 DRAM adoption in the server market, contributing up to 40% revenue increase in 2024 and 60-65% in the next year. For notebooks, the LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X memory could result in a 50% and 60% revenue increase respectively. It is estimated that the DRAM memory prices will increase by 53% this year and 35% next year, leading to higher revenue targets.

On the NAND flash side, QLC flash adoption in enterprise SSDs and UFS storage for smartphones is expected to be a major reason for increasing the NAND flash demand in 2025. AI servers have already started using QLC SSD in large quantities and QLC is expected to ship 20% of the total NAND flash shipments in 2024. While Chinese manufacturers will start using UFS storage at the end of the year, Apple will adopt it in 2026 for its smartphones.