Even strong Galaxy sales may not offset surging RAM and storage costs that now rival displays and processors
Bottom line: Samsung's mobile division faces an unprecedented financial threat not from competition or weak sales, but from the AI industry's insatiable appetite for memory components. TM Roh, head of Samsung MX, has alerted company leadership that the division could post its first net loss in the division's history. The culprit is LPDDR5X memory and NAND storage, components now commanding premium prices.
The half-bandwidth, half-density memory spec was co-developed with Intel and TeamGroup
Please Burst: Asrock recently introduced the HUDIMM standard, a new type of DDR5 RAM module designed to slash performance and keep the PC memory market affordable throughout some never-before-seen market conditions. The new HUDIMM modules are essentially a worse edition of traditional DDR5, because memory prices inflated by enterprise and AI demand have pushed capable consumer hardware increasingly out of reach for mainstream buyers.
In a nutshell: The ongoing AI boom has already inflated the cost of memory, storage, and processors, with effects spilling over to electronics incorporating those components. The impact of AI data center expansion is not expected to subside anytime soon, and to make matters worse, the conflict between the US and Iran threatens to worsen supply chain disruptions while creating new ones.