Organization: The burden of storage chip prices may be passed on from consumer electronics products to AI.

Analysts at Bernstein stated in a research report that the burden of rising storage chip prices may transfer from consumer electronics products to AI. Due to the push for a significant amount of supply to shift towards HBM to support AI computing, traditional DRAM prices have increased significantly in recent quarters. However, the price of HBM remains locked in annual contracts and has not changed. Bernstein analysts indicated that storage chip suppliers and GPU/XPU companies are in negotiations to raise HBM prices for 2027 in order to narrow the profit gap with traditional DRAM. They suggested that GPU/XPU suppliers may also further increase HBM prices to protect their profit margins. Therefore, Bernstein estimated that super-scale cloud service providers may need to increase their AI capital expenditures by 30% to cover the higher storage chip costs. They added that considering competition pressures and funding availability, super-scale cloud service providers are unlikely to slow down their AI investments.