Memory chip prices are still rising where it counts for chipmakers' profits, in contract deals with big buyers, even as trading in the open spot market has stalled. TrendForce, the Taipei-based market research firm, expects conventional DRAM contract prices to climb 10% to 15% in the fourth quarter from the third, with NAND flash contract prices up 15% to 20%.

The split matters for investors in Asia because Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Japan's Kioxia and Taiwan's Nanya Technology earn most of their memory revenue on contract terms. A softer spot market has often been the first sign that a memory upcycle is losing steam. This time the industry's research houses say supply, not demand, is still setting the price.

Spot buyers step back

TrendForce's DRAM spot table, updated Monday afternoon Taipei time, showed little movement. The average spot price for a DDR4 16-gigabit chip was $82.719, down 0.09% on the session, and the mainstream DDR5 16Gb chip was unchanged at $61.50. The older DDR4 part now trades well above its successor, a sign of how quickly suppliers have cut output of legacy chips.

In its Oct. 28 market bulletin, TrendForce said some chip prices had edged up on small, specific orders, but weak demand and typhoon disruptions kept buyers from chasing prices higher. PC makers, it said, are carrying more inventory as shipments shrink and have cut purchase volumes for next year. Module houses are scaling back buying of downgraded chips, and smartphone brands have turned cautious after heavy stockpiling in the first half.

The suppliers sit on the other side of that trade. TrendForce said AI demand and extra orders from U.S. cloud providers have left memory makers with extremely low inventory and strong bargaining power. As the three largest suppliers phase out mature DDR4 production, consumer DRAM contract prices are rising moderately this quarter, the bulletin said.

Why contract prices keep rising

The main driver is the server. In its fourth-quarter outlook, TrendForce said DRAM makers keep steering advanced-process capacity toward high-performance server products, leaving the overall market undersupplied. Server DRAM is expected to stay short through the quarter as cloud providers and server makers buy more general-purpose memory modules for AI agent workloads. Packaging, testing and front-end production limits are keeping supply from catching up, it said.

The pace is slowing, though. TrendForce said contract price gains are moderating, and that some suppliers' increases may trail the market average because long-term agreements fix how prices are set. Mobile DRAM remains tight, but much of the increase was already priced in during earlier quarters. Higher component costs are also showing up in notebook prices and weighing on sales, though PC makers were still buying aggressively on expectations that supply stays tight in 2027.

Enterprise solid-state drives are the exception. TrendForce expects bit demand for these data center drives to grow more than 80% in 2026 as cloud companies build out AI inference systems, and it forecasts that enterprise SSD price growth will accelerate in the fourth quarter. It is the only memory category where TrendForce sees a larger increase than in the previous quarter.

High-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators, is tighter still. TrendForce in late September raised its 2027 outlook and now projects the blended average selling price of HBM to jump 121% next year, citing persistent supply constraints and a larger share of pricier HBM4.

What the chipmakers are seeing

Samsung's third-quarter numbers show how far prices have outrun volumes. TrendForce News, citing News1, said Kim Jae-june, an executive vice president in Samsung's memory business, put the third-quarter rise in DRAM average selling prices at around 20% from the second quarter and NAND at a high-teens percentage, while DRAM shipments grew only by a low- to mid-single-digit percentage. Samsung has signed long-term supply agreements with 10 major customers and is negotiating with another 10, according to the TrendForce News report, which cited Aju Business Daily. SK Hynix, which posted a record 83 trillion won operating profit last week, has warned that shortages could persist through 2030, TrendForce News reported.

The broader chip market reflects the same pricing. Global semiconductor sales reached $159.7 billion in August, up 144.3% from a year earlier and 8% from July, the Semiconductor Industry Association said, based on World Semiconductor Trade Statistics data. Year-to-date sales passed $1 trillion for the first time, and the group projects sales above $1.6 trillion for 2026.

Shortages are now showing up in factory data. Lien Hsien-ming, president of Taiwan's Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, said on Monday that a lack of memory chips and substrates had postponed deliveries and slowed AI development, according to Focus Taiwan. Taiwan's manufacturing purchasing managers' index fell 0.9 point to 62.5 in October, still in expansion. Nanya shares rose 0.44% to NT$456.50 in Taipei the same day, the agency reported.

Memory stocks have been volatile despite the price data, and an AI selloff hit Kioxia as the Nikkei 225 shed 5.2% in October. The next markers are the Semiconductor Industry Association's September sales figures and TrendForce's next contract price readings, which will show whether the 10% to 15% DRAM forecast is holding.