Dell CEO Says the Memory Shortage Will Get Worse in 2027

Michael Dell doesn't think the memory shortage is anywhere near over. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, Dell's chairman and CEO said things will get worse next year, as the AI data center buildout keeps soaking up DRAM and HBM supply. According to him, the bottleneck for Dell isn't demand, since the company is sitting on roughly $95 billion worth of AI server orders it hasn't delivered yet, the largest backlog in its history. Memory is what's holding those shipments back, as AI accelerators need plenty of HBM, while the servers around them still rely on conventional DRAM.

Relief also looks quite far away. New memory fabs take around four years to build, so Dell apparently doesn't expect meaningful new supply until 2029 or 2030. That aligns with Micron's CEO, who recently said supply will be much tighter in 2027 and 2028 than it is this year. Interestingly, SK hynix's CEO said something similar, expecting the memory shortage to last through 2030. Dell is reportedly coping by buying DRAM only when final assembly is close and by locking in long-term supply agreements, though there's no word on how much of that applies to its consumer products. Read full story