Lenovo on DRAM And NAND Prices: The New Normal Through 2030

Memory prices are not coming back down, and Lenovo says you should stop waiting for them to. At ISC 2026, the PC maker presented a slide arguing that DRAM and NAND prices are unlikely to return to early-2025 levels even into 2030 and beyond, framing today’s elevated pricing as the new baseline. As reported by Wccftech, citing Lenovo’s presentation and sourced from Computerbase, the warning lands alongside similar admissions from Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix — the three companies that make the memory.

That matters because memory is not a niche component. It sits inside every laptop, phone, console, server and SSD you buy, which means a structural shift in its price feeds through to almost everything with a chip in it. For UAE buyers — consumers refreshing a laptop, businesses provisioning AI infrastructure — the message is that the cheap-memory era is over for the foreseeable decade.

What Lenovo said at ISC 2026

Lenovo’s core claim is that no amount of new factory capacity will pull prices back to where they sat a year ago. The presenter walked through the price trajectory of DRAM and NAND, noting that prices began spiralling around the end of Q3 and the start of Q4 2025 and now sit at levels, in the company’s words, that “no one ever thought they would be at.” Despite memory makers building new fabs to close the gap, Lenovo argued the additions will “hardly make a dent.”

The headline line was delivered partly as a joke — but the analysis underneath it was not. The presenter said higher prices would become the new normal moving into 2030 and beyond. Worth keeping in proportion: this is one vendor’s slide, not an official market forecast. The reason it carries weight is that it echoes what the suppliers themselves have already conceded.

Why memory makers can’t just build their way out

The short answer: AI demand is growing faster than fabs can be built. Micron has said the situation is out of its hands and that it cannot fulfil demand even for its strategic, top-tier customers, while Samsung and SK Hynix have made comparable statements. These are not companies pleading poverty — they are posting large profits off the AI boom. The constraint is physical, not financial.

This is the part the strategic lens makes clear. Memory is a commodity business with brutal cycles: when prices crash, makers stop investing in capacity; when demand spikes, that under-investment leaves them short, and prices run. What is different this time is the source of demand. AI training and inference consume high-bandwidth memory and general-purpose DRAM at a scale that swamps the consumer and enterprise PC markets that historically set the price. When the highest-margin buyer in the room is a hyperscaler building AI clusters, a UAE shopper buying a single laptop is at the back of the queue — and pays accordingly. The recent run that pushed SK Hynix into the trillion-dollar club is the same dynamic viewed from the supplier’s side of the ledger.

How prices have moved since early 2025

The trajectory Lenovo described is a steady climb from a low base into territory it calls exceptional. The slide framed it as four phases, with no concrete figures attached — the company used qualitative descriptors instead of percentages.

No specific price points or percentages were given in Lenovo’s presentation, so treat the bands as direction instead of detail.

Is SK Hynix’s fab expansion enough to fix it

Lenovo’s view is that even the most aggressive capacity plan on the table falls short. SK Hynix is expected to expand its fabs by fast-forwarding its original 2040-plus roadmap to 2030-plus, aiming to triple memory output by that timeframe. On paper that is a serious response. Lenovo’s caution is that, like Micron’s additions, it may simply not be enough to meet demand on both ends.

Here is the key insight: tripling output only lowers prices if demand grows slower than supply. If AI consumption keeps compounding through the end of the decade, more capacity gets absorbed the moment it comes online and the gap never closes. That is precisely why Lenovo refuses to forecast a return to old pricing — the bottleneck is a moving target, and the buyer with the deepest pockets keeps moving it.

What it means for UAE buyers and businesses

For anyone in the region buying memory-heavy hardware, the practical takeaway is to plan for higher prices as a fixed condition, not a passing spike. Lenovo was explicit that the effect won’t stay confined to RAM sticks and SSDs — every product built around them, from PCs and consoles to phones, carries the cost through. The familiar pattern of devices getting cheaper at the same spec each year is the thing under threat.

For UAE businesses, the implication runs deeper than a pricier laptop fleet. The region’s data-centre build-out and AI ambitions depend on exactly the components in shortest supply, which raises the cost base for everyone chasing local AI capacity — and gives an edge to players who can secure supply early. It is the same supply-chain position now shaping deals across the region’s AI infrastructure plans, and the same memory boom that has Samsung’s own workers pushing for a cut of the profits. No UAE-specific pricing or distributor figures were given in the source, so local retail impact is best read off these supplier dynamics instead of a published number.

The honest summary: this is bad news for consumers and a planning headache for businesses, told through one vendor’s slide but consistent with what the suppliers themselves are saying. If the model holds, the next several years of hardware will be defined less by what gets faster and more by what gets more expensive.