NuAxiSemiconductor trade intelligence

Dell CEO Says the Memory Shortage Will Get Worse in 2027

What happened

Michael Dell, Dell's chairman and CEO, told The Wall Street Journal that he does not think the memory shortage is anywhere near over and said things will get worse in 2027 (next year), as the AI data center buildout keeps soaking up DRAM and HBM supply. According to him, the bottleneck for Dell is not demand: the company is sitting on roughly $95 billion worth of undelivered AI server orders, the largest backlog in its history, and memory is what is holding those shipments back, since AI accelerators need plenty of HBM while the servers around them still rely on conventional DRAM. Relief also looks far away: new memory fabs take around four years to build, so Dell apparently does not expect meaningful new supply until 2029 or 2030. That aligns with Micron's CEO, who recently said supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than this year, and SK hynix's CEO similarly expects the memory shortage to last through 2030. Dell is reportedly coping by buying DRAM only when final assembly is close and by locking in long-term supply agreements, though there is no word on how much of that applies to its consumer products.