memory

Market research firm Counterpoint Research data shows that in the third quarter of 2026, major personal computer manufacturers experienced double-digit declines in sales, with HP down 31%, Dell down 25%, Lenovo down 23%, and Apple down 11%. The firm expects that personal computer shipments will decline by another 27% in the fourth quarter, with business demand being better than consumer demand, but not enough to offset the overall contraction.In terms of shipments, Lenovo shipped 15 million units, with a market share of 26.3%; HP shipped 10.3 million units; Dell shipped 7.6 million units; Apple shipped 5.6 million units, with a share of 9.8%, up from 8.7% in the same period last year, as the MacBook Neo alleviated the decline. ASUS saw a shipment decline of 7%.Counterpoint analyst Minsoo Kang stated that rising memory and component costs are pushing up system prices, causing consumers to delay upgrades. David Naranjo mentioned that the industry is undergoing structural adjustments, with component costs, system prices, and longer upgrade cycles reshaping the market. The report also stated that the increase in DRAM and NAND prices may slow down in the first half of 2027, and Micron indicated that the chip shortage may last until 2028.

According to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated during a media interview at the GTC conference in Berlin on Thursday that the likelihood of a memory supply surplus by 2029 is low. He mentioned that one great aspect of memory is that there is always more that can be used, and he noted that HBM will continue to be applied in the coming years.Jensen Huang also stated that Nvidia is the first company in the world to introduce LPDDR memory, used in mobile phones, into data centers, which doubles its energy efficiency compared to any current global solution, thus it will continue to use this type of memory extensively. He mentioned last Thursday that customer demand for AI chip orders continues to exceed the company's supply capacity, with new orders pouring in almost weekly, if not daily.In the past week, storage chip stocks faced sell-offs due to market concerns over supply surplus and weak demand. A well-known media outlet in South Korea published a column last week, citing two experts who predicted that by 2029, there will be a significant increase in semiconductor supply, and the storage chip market may turn into a red ocean. On Thursday, the Nasdaq Composite Index closed down 2.6%, at 26008.86 points; SanDisk fell 8.51%, SK Hynix fell 8.07%, Seagate Technology fell 7.86%, Western Digital fell 6.43%, and Micron Technology fell 6.23%.

Micron Technology Vice President Li Zhe stated at the Korea Semiconductor Exhibition SEDEX 2026 held at COEX in Seoul that the company is developing Edge Inference Memory (EIM) for physical AI. The industry expects this product to enter mass production in the second half of 2028. Micron is researching the use of EIM in LPDDR6 to meet the demand for low-power DRAM in applications such as autonomous driving and humanoid robots, and is in discussions with major customers regarding related products.According to a report by the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, EIM is positioned between AI chips and memory, utilizing a method of stacking LPDDR on logic chips to process inference data at high speed, although the computing architecture has not been fully disclosed. Li Zhe mentioned that current robotic AI models have about 1 billion to 2 billion parameters, with low bandwidth requirements; however, as more advanced visual language models emerge, LPDDR alone will not suffice, and HBM will eventually be used for humanoid robots. Micron anticipates that future high-performance humanoid robots will require approximately 200 GB of DRAM and 4 TB of storage, while current service robots require about 12 GB of DRAM and 256 GB of storage.Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra stated that the storage capacity of a single humanoid robot is about 10 times that of an ordinary L2+ passenger vehicle. The storage industry may enter a period of sustained demand growth for several decades around 2030, driven by the need to synchronize data from hundreds of sensors and run large models locally for millisecond-level control. Counterpoint Research predicts that global DRAM demand for humanoid robots will increase from approximately 8,300 Tbit this year to about 172,000 Tbit by 2030.

Samsung Electronics will adopt TSMC's 3-nanometer process to produce the next generation of custom HBM chip bare dies for NVIDIA. This is the first time Samsung has collaborated with TSMC in the HBM manufacturing stage.NVIDIA has requested Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology to use TSMC's process to manufacture NVHBM bare dies and to utilize sixth-generation DRAM technology. Samsung plans to continue independently producing standard HBM and custom products for other customers.

On October 13, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated on social media platform X: Once China masters the manufacturing methods for a certain type of product, its ability to scale production often exceeds that of the rest of the world combined. He cited lithium batteries and solar energy as examples, claiming that China has demonstrated this characteristic in these fields. This statement was in response to a discussion about memory manufacturer Changxin Storage.The poster Melvin believes that Changxin is already a competitor that cannot be ignored, but whether new technology can stably achieve large-scale mass production still depends on yield, cost, and reliability. He also noted that memory demand is still growing, and an increase in production capacity does not mean that the market will immediately experience oversupply. Regarding memory, Musk mentioned that about three years ago, memory was still a low-margin commodity, with LPDDR5 and LPDDR6 designed according to common standards, and China seems to be rapidly solving related technical issues.Musk also pointed out that the new generation of high-bandwidth memory architecture is more difficult to tackle. Another challenge is placing a layer of SRAM beneath the logic chip and stacking RAM in three dimensions above it while addressing the heat dissipation issues of the logic chip. Phoenix Technology cited public information stating that on September 7, Changxin Storage announced that LPDDR6 has entered mass production and was first commercially used in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, with a capacity of 16 GB, compliant with JEDEC's LPDDR6 standard. Subsequently, Changxin announced that its fifth-generation DRAM process platform has achieved mass production and launched two LPDDR5X products based on this platform, aimed at smartphones and portable consumer electronics, with a single bare chip capacity increased by 50% compared to the previous generation of similar products.

According to official news from Aptos, the Aptos mainnet has officially launched the Encrypted Mempool feature. Users can choose to encrypt pending transactions before block finalization, keeping the transaction call functions and input content encrypted before execution, while the sender's address and fee information remain visible to the outside.This feature is mainly aimed at institutions (to avoid exposing intentions of large orders in advance), traders (to reduce MEV arbitrage risks), and AI entities (to ensure transaction inputs remain private before execution).

Changxin Storage (CXMT), a Chinese memory chip company, announced that it has made key progress on a new storage architecture. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are also advancing similar architectures to increase storage density. The company's president, Cao Kanyu, stated at an industry event in Shanghai that Changxin Storage plans to launch new server memory products based on this architecture by the end of 2026, according to a company statement.The architecture is designed as 4F², meaning each memory cell occupies an area of 4F², where F is the minimum line width of the semiconductor. The company claims that this proprietary transistor design can improve storage density and efficiency by accommodating more memory cells on a single chip. Currently, mainstream commercial DRAM uses a 6F² cell structure.

Samsung Electronics announced preliminary results for the third quarter, with operating profit soaring 783% year-on-year and increasing 20.01% quarter-on-quarter, slightly exceeding analysts' expectations. The surge in demand for artificial intelligence chips has driven profit growth in the memory business.Samsung expects Q3 operating profit to be 107.4 trillion won (approximately 80.17 billion USD), with revenue of 195 trillion won, a year-on-year increase of 127%.

According to the Korea Economic Daily, Samsung Electronics' next-generation high-bandwidth memory "12-layer HBM4E" product has passed quality verification by Nvidia and major hyperscale data center operators.

Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd has joined the MARA Foundation as the chief maintainer of Slipstream. Slipstream is MARA's private Bitcoin mempool service, and the foundation announced this appointment on Thursday. Todd will be responsible for the development and operation of this service.Slipstream allows users to send Bitcoin transactions directly to the MARA Pool without going through the public Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. Since transactions sent via Slipstream remain private before block confirmation, this service helps to conceal key information before confirmation, avoiding the exposure of public keys. The service played a role after hackers exploited a vulnerability in the Coldcard hardware wallet to steal over $115 million in user funds in July this year.MARA's Slipstream first gained attention in 2024 for releasing large Ordinals inscriptions and has recently been used in research projects such as Quantum Safe Bitcoin and Binohash. Todd is a long-time Bitcoin Core contributor, co-author of BIP 125 (replace-by-fee), creator of OpenTimestamps, and launched Libre Relay in 2024. He believes that mempool policies should follow what the market wants miners to package, rather than restricting how people use Bitcoin.

Trader degentrading (@degentradingLSD) pre-market analysis shows the following major signals in the current market:Macroeconomic Level: The 10Y yield has risen to 5.2%, and the 30Y has risen to 5.5%, approaching historical highs; the South Korean stock market opened down 2.5%, with the memory and semiconductor sectors (SK Hynix, Samsung, MU, SNDK) generally down 2% to 5%. It is expected that price movements will continue to fluctuate before MU's earnings report is released.New Cloud Computing: The investment payback period for computing projects is now less than a year, and market perceptions are changing. It is expected that the new cloud sector will undergo rapid revaluation, and the issue of power bottlenecks is also receiving increasing attention.Tech Stocks: META is weak pre-market, focusing on buying at the 690 support level or opportunities for breaking historical highs. If the large-scale data center sector breaks through as a whole, META, MSFT, and others will face paradigm-level repricing.Cryptocurrency Market: Mainstream coins and altcoins are generally weak, with BTC possibly testing the 82K support level; last week, TAO and DOGE were reduced, and CRDO was taken for profit to release risk capital. During the KBW period, crypto sentiment is usually somewhat positive, and this week's strategy focuses on finding short-term bullish opportunities.

According to Slow Fog Security Alert, the AI memory toolchain under MemTensor has been compromised. The open-source long-term memory library MemoryOS (PyPI) aimed at LLM and AI Agent, as well as the official plugin memtensor/memos-cloud-openclaw-plugin (npm) that connects to the OpenClaw runtime, have been implanted with a cross-platform Go binary, which triggers execution when the package is loaded or imported.Affected versions include: MemoryOS==2.34 on PyPI, and npm plugins 0.1.21, 0.1.23, 0.1.25. Among them, the affected npm plugins may also cause user prompt content leakage. Slow Fog recommends taking the following measures: uninstall or downgrade to known safe versions (npm 0.1.20, PyPI 2.33); terminate the sckit process; block related infrastructure; check network activity; and rotate credentials in the affected environment.

In episode 166 of the BidClub podcast, chip designer Bubble boi stated that high-bandwidth flash is technically attractive but lacks decisive data center use cases. The information he provided indicated that the main customers he heard about are Chinese clients who find it difficult to obtain or produce high-end HBM.Bubble boi mentioned that HBF and high-end AI flash have a latency of about 5 microseconds, lower bandwidth than HBM, a lower cost per bit, but the total cost may be comparable. He believes the clearest customers are entities unable to obtain HBM, which aligns with the Chinese demand he heard from two to three people, as they cannot adequately manufacture accelerators or are willing to accept non-leading specification products.

The global memory market continues to face severe shortages, with AI and cloud applications driving demand and prices for DRAM and NAND Flash. China's two major memory manufacturers, Yangtze Memory Technologies and Changxin Memory Technologies, are set to break the current duopoly.Yangtze Memory Technologies will begin trial production of LPDDR5 DRAM by the end of 2026, while Changxin Memory Technologies aims to transition from DRAM to NAND Flash. Industry speculation suggests that the two companies may face off as early as 2028. Yangtze Memory Technologies has completed the development of 294-layer 3D NAND using Xtacking technology, and Samsung will enter into a patent licensing agreement with them in 2025, starting with the 10th generation V-NAND.Yangtze Memory Technologies' phase three plan is set to commence production by the end of 2026, with an initial capacity of approximately 25,000 wafers of DRAM, ramping up in 2027, targeting LPDDR5, and planning for subsequent expansions as well as HBM and 3D DRAM. Changxin is reported to be setting up a NAND research and production line in Beijing, with mass production expected as early as 2028 to 2029.

Micron and the Taiwan Micron Memory Union held their first mediation meeting on September 18. Micron stated that both parties engaged in constructive discussions that helped advance communication and agreed to hold a second mediation meeting on October 22.Micron pointed out that representatives from both sides discussed several topics during the meeting, including the overall compensation and bonus system framework, No Free Rider, and Non-Retaliation issues. Regarding Non-Retaliation, Micron reiterated the company's commitment that according to the Micron Global Team Member Handbook, team members have the right to peacefully assemble, freely associate, form and join unions or labor organizations of their choice, and seek collective bargaining or other forms of representation without fear of retaliation.Micron expressed gratitude to the Central Science Park Administration and the mediation committee for their assistance and support during this mediation process. Moving forward, both parties will continue to uphold a spirit of mutual respect, support employees, serve customers, and jointly promote the company's ongoing success through positive and pragmatic communication.

At the 2026 World Manufacturing Conference, memory chip manufacturer Changxin Technology announced the official mass production of its fifth-generation technology platform.According to reports, Changxin Technology has achieved a half-pitch of 11.95 nanometers in the active area of the memory array, with a capacitor aspect ratio of 45:1, and the height of the core kinetic area has been reduced to 6762 nanometers. The storage density of the fifth-generation process platform has significantly improved, with each wafer producing over 50% more than the previous generation platform under the same conditions.The 24GB LPDDR5X product developed based on this platform has entered formal mass production and is being used in mainstream domestic flagship smartphones.

Acer Chairman Chen Junsheng stated on the 19th that there is no shortage of memory, as suppliers in mainland China are continuously releasing quantities, acting as price destroyers. The contract prices are currently experiencing high fluctuations, with chaotic ups and downs. Some components like LPDDR5 or DDR5 9600 paired with N1 or N1X are still in short supply, but more common components like DDR4 are in oversupply. Currently, there is also no shortage of CPUs, except for certain low-priced licensed models from Microsoft, such as those with Small Core specifications, which are in tight supply.Chen Junsheng pointed out that the price increases for key components this year are unprecedented, with customers going from complaining to scrambling for goods. Acer is increasing its inventory of low-priced components in response, facing pressure to raise PC prices each quarter, with different products still seeing price increases of 5% to 20% in the fourth quarter. The three major memory suppliers have expressed optimism about price increases until 2027, but the unlimited production capacity released by mainland China means that sustained price increases are unlikely.He expects that by 2027, Acer's costs for SSDs and memory will decline compared to this year, with a chance for prices to stabilize in the second half of next year. There may still be opportunities for price increases in the first quarter of 2027, but the increases should become narrower. The expansion of semiconductor production is expected to begin in mid-2027, after which prices may peak and enter a stable phase.

Micron Technology will announce its fiscal fourth-quarter results on September 30. NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress stated during the fiscal second-quarter conference call on August 26 that the company is seeing "extreme pricing conditions in memory," with price increases exceeding previous expectations, and that "will further rise next year." Pricing pressure has been reflected in NVIDIA's margins, with Kress guiding that gross margins will bottom out in the fourth quarter in the range of 71%-72%, before recovering to 72%-73% in fiscal year 2028.Kress indicated that the current memory shortage is largely driven by AI infrastructure itself. SK Hynix expects the memory market to reach supply-demand balance no earlier than 2030 and has invested approximately $38.3 billion to expand its two domestic bases in South Korea through 2031. SK Hynix holds about 50% of the high-bandwidth memory market share, leading Samsung's 33% and Micron's 18%.

According to Reuters, citing informed sources, Changxin Storage (CXMT) is preparing to enter the NAND flash memory chip market, expanding beyond its core DRAM business and competing with Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Micron, and Yangtze Memory Technologies.Changxin Storage plans to establish a NAND flash research and production line at its new factory in Beijing and set up a research institute in Beijing that includes NAND development projects. The company has discussed related plans with clients, including a startup that intends to procure chips for AI systems and supercomputers. The timeline for the operation of the R&D line or large-scale commercial manufacturing remains unclear.The global storage shortage is driven by demand for AI servers and is expected to last at least until 2027. Manufacturers prioritize DRAM and HBM spending, limiting the increase in NAND capacity. Changxin Storage raised 57.92 billion yuan in its IPO in July. Yangtze Memory Technologies was placed on the entity list in 2022.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.