Counterpoint puts Q3 memory revenue near $200 billion as prices drive a 369% surge

Memory makers are collecting much more money without shipping much more memory. Counterpoint Research put global DRAM revenue at just under $200 billion in the third quarter of 2026, up 369% from a year earlier, TechRadar reported November 11. Higher prices drove most of the increase as AI-server demand kept supply tight.

A revenue boom is not a supply boom

DRAM is the memory used across servers, PCs and smartphones. Its sales can rise because buyers purchase more capacity, because each unit costs more, or both. Counterpoint’s findings point mainly to the second explanation: analyst Jeongku Choi said bit shipments—the amount of memory capacity shipped—rose only about 4% in the quarter.

Counterpoint put the blended selling price at $1.90 per gigabit, a measure of memory capacity. That is an average across the DRAM market, not the retail price of a memory module or a quote for one specific chip. The 369% headline figure measures revenue growth; it is not a reported percentage increase in memory prices.

The distinction changes how to read the boom. Revenue approaching $200 billion does not describe a comparable expansion in the memory available to buyers. Counterpoint’s explanation is that demand for AI accelerators and data-center servers pushed selling prices to new records while supply remained constrained.

$1.90Blended DRAM selling price

Counterpoint’s Q3 2026 average measures the selling price per unit of memory capacity across the DRAM market.

AI demand reaches ordinary server memory

One revealing finding concerns high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the specialized memory attached to AI processors. Its share of DRAM revenue fell during the quarter even though its revenue nearly doubled. Conventional DDR and LPDDR memory grew faster still. A smaller share therefore did not mean that the HBM business was shrinking.

Counterpoint associate director Brady Wang linked unprecedented demand for conventional DRAM to agentic AI—systems that carry out tasks. Those workloads rely more heavily on general-purpose CPU servers using standard DDR5 memory, rather than only on the specialized memory attached to graphics processors. The pressure is spreading across different kinds of memory.

That creates a direct connection to consumer hardware. PC and smartphone makers compete with large cloud operators for the same fabrication capacity. AI demand is not confined to an isolated premium component: it also affects the production resources behind memory used in everyday devices.

Weaker device sales have not delivered price relief

The memory surge coincided with a much weaker consumer-device market. Global smartphone shipments fell 20% year over year in the third quarter, according to the figures TechRadar cited. IDC counted 62.7 million PC shipments, down from 78.5 million a year earlier. Counterpoint also put this year’s increase in retail phone prices at around 20%.

An earlier forecast points to further pressure, rather than an immediate reversal. In its September 30 outlook, TrendForce projected that conventional DRAM contract prices would rise another 10% to 15% quarter over quarter in Q4 2026. That forecast describes a slower pace of increases, not falling prices, and remains a projection rather than a completed-quarter result.

Adding manufacturing capacity also takes time. Micron said its first new Idaho fabrication plant would not begin producing wafers until mid-2027. The company said it had no clear view of when memory supply and demand would return to balance. That leaves buyers facing uncertainty over when additional production will translate into relief.