Morning brief 10:53 AM ET

Memory Report — 2026-07-03

Korean memory shares snapped back hard on Friday, with SK Hynix and Samsung leading a near 6% Kospi rebound that torched the prior day's "AI is peaking" panic and reaffirmed the market's read that the memory shortage is structural, not spent.

The tape told the story. The Kospi closed at 8,088.34, up 5.76 percent, as Samsung Electronics rose 8.22 percent and SK hynix climbed 10.88 percent to 2,425,000 won. A buy-side sidecar was activated on the Kospi Friday afternoon, triggered when Kospi 200 futures rise 5 percent or more above a baseline and sustain that level for one minute. The bounce reversed a brutal Thursday, when SK Hynix closed down 14.6 percent, its worst single-day drop in years, and Samsung fell 9.1 percent, dragging the Kospi down 7.9 percent to 7,648. The proximate cause of the selloff was sentiment, not fundamentals: reports that Meta is building a cloud business to sell off excess AI computing power, which investors read as a signal that memory demand might not keep growing as fast as expected. Korean brokerages pushed back hard, and the pricing data is on their side.

On that pricing data, the near-term deceleration is real and worth naming. Driven by AI server demand, 3Q26 memory contract prices continue to rise, but due to high baselines and consumer cost limits, overall price growth will decelerate. TrendForce sees conventional DRAM, server DRAM, and enterprise SSD maintaining double-digit growth, while mobile and wafer narrow to single digits. That is a slowdown in the rate of increase, not a reversal, and the supply side remains locked: the three major DRAM suppliers continue to prioritize advanced-node production for HBM and server DRAM driven by AI infrastructure investment, cutting wafer allocations for DDR4 and other mature-node products.

The suppliers are pressing the advantage structurally. SK Hynix is removing price caps from its recently signed long-term agreements, a structure that allows spot-price surges to be fully reflected in the contract price when shortages push market prices higher. The industry views SK Hynix as the only major memory maker not applying price caps, while it and Samsung extend contract periods from the existing one-year level to three to five years. Micron, by contrast, keeps its guardrails: its Strategic Customer Agreements include binding volume commitments, an upper price cap tied to April-to-June market levels, and a contractual price floor over the full term. Micron's June quarter validated the setup, with 16 strategic customer agreements now signed and management noting HBM3E and HBM4 are fully booked through calendar 2027, with demand extending into 2028.

Capex is the other tell that operators believe this runs for years. SK Hynix said it would invest 100 trillion won, about 64.38 billion dollars, to build new chip plants, including one for NAND flash, as part of a South Korean investment drive. The plan allocates 80 trillion won to the M17 NAND fab and 20 trillion won to the P&T7 advanced packaging facility, with M17 construction starting in 2027 and operations targeted for the first half of 2029. The catch worth flagging: all three HBM makers are running enormous simultaneous capex programs, and new capacity from Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung could all come online at roughly the same time in 2027-2028, the seed of any eventual normalization.

Watch Samsung's preliminary second-quarter results on July 7, the next hard read on whether server DRAM pricing is still outrunning expectations or whether the bears finally have a data point to hang the "capacity peak" thesis on.

July 3rd, 2026

Memory Report — 2026-07-03

Sources