2026 is just beginning, but there are no signs of relief in the tight supply of storage chips.

In the past month, several business hotels in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, have seen many familiar faces—heads of procurement departments from tech giants like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Dell are stationed there long-term. Their schedules are packed, almost daily commuting between Samsung Electronics' semiconductor division and SK Hynix headquarters, with a round trip taking 30 to 40 minutes.

The goal of these buyers is quite simple: to lock in a 2 to 3-year long-term supply agreement to ensure their production capacity. But the problem is, the two leading companies with available capacity are not willing to cooperate. Samsung and Hynix are very firm—they only sign quarterly contracts, and long-term agreements are off the table.

And that's not the worst part. According to Korea Economic Daily, both companies have issued price increase notices to DRAM customers for servers, PCs, and smartphones, with prices for the first quarter expected to rise by 60% to 70% compared to Q4 of last year.

An industry insider in semiconductors bluntly stated: "Customers are well aware that Samsung and Hynix are unlikely to significantly expand capacity in the short term." Market research firm DRAMeXchange's analysis is even more interesting—they believe that even with such price increases, major clients can accept it. Why? Because these giants see AI infrastructure development as more important than anything else. Compared to commercializing AI inference, chip price hikes are simply not an issue. Therefore, DRAMeXchange has raised its expectation for the fixed transaction price increase of server DRAM in Q1 to 60% to 65%.

This move by the storage chip giants has completely rewritten the industry's pricing power.