In January, Samsung’s DRAM contract negotiations were expected to close at around a 70% increase for Q1. Within a month, that number reportedly finalized above 100% — and even Apple accepted the terms without extended negotiation.

The interesting part isn’t just the magnitude of the hike. It’s the speed of the revision. A 30-point upward adjustment in such a short time period suggests demand acceleration that outpaced internal forecasts.

The driver appears to be wafer reallocation toward HBM production for AI accelerators. HBM consumes roughly 3× the wafer capacity per gigabyte compared to standard DRAM, which effectively compresses supply for generic server and mobile memory.

If that structural shift holds, this may not be a cyclical “memory recovery” but a repricing event tied to AI infrastructure buildout.