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Almost half a trillion dollars sucked up by memory industry Nearly half a trillion dollars has been earned by the memory industry in the past 12 months as demand for AI servers has gone hypersonic. The enormous rise in purchases by hyperscalers, neoclouds and large enterprises of AI servers, with HBM-intensive GPUs, DRAM-loaded CPUs, and all-flash storage has not just sent Nvidia revenues to the near $100 billion quarter level, it has near quadrupled revenues for US, Japanese and Korean memory and NAND suppliers. The really big winners have been high-bandwidth, memory (HBM) suppliers but NAND-only suppliers have benefitted as well. So much so that its has made a total of $483.7 billion dollars in the past year. If we tabulate the last four quarter’s dollar revenues by Kioxia, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk and SK Hynix then we see how their revenues have, in total, nearly risen 4x over four quarters. Charting their revenues shows this even more clearly. The bulk of the money taken in is accounted for by HBM, then by DRAM and, thirdly, by NAND. This is shown by the comparatively low revenues of the NAND-only suppliers Kioxia and Sandisk and a DRAM+HBM vs NAND revenue split for Micron. The beneficiaries of this humungous dollar transfer to the memory+NAND suppliers are the businesses themselves, of course, but they are spending the money on uprating and expanding their fab cleanrooms and packaging plants, the equipment inside them, building new fabs, bonus payments for their staff, dividends and stock buybacks for their share holders and taxes. The money is put to use. If the memory plus NAND supply imbalance continues out to 2030, then we face three more years of this and a likely transfer of around another $1.5 trillion to these five companies. Bringing in China with its indigenous memory and DRAM suppliers, CXMT and YMTC for example, and we're likely looking at the $2 trillion area. Crude oil sales in 2025 were about $2.6 trillion with up to 100 major world-wide operators taking most of the revenues. The worldwide memory and NAND business is smaller but what is unprecedented, we think, about the memory and NAND dollar glut is that it is concentrated across so few companies; less than 10 worldwide.
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