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Chip makers warn of a looming shortage in DRAM and SSD | Computer Weekly

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Chip makers warn of a looming shortage in DRAM and SSD | Computer Weekly


Chip manufacturers are warning of a shortage in DRAM, NAND and probably HBM memory chips because demand from cloud providers is outstripping supply. The problem is compounded by the Trump administration’s recent ban on Chinese factories manufacturing these components.

The largest component manufacturer, Samsung, announced last week in the Korean press that it was going to focus on the production of DRAM chips to the detriment of NAND at its Pyeongtaek and Hwaseong factories in South Korea, which until now have manufactured both types of component.

The reason given is that RAM is receiving the highest demand from customers. This explosion in the need for DRAM stems from the high volumes of memory required in servers to load artificial intelligence (AI) models, the size of which – often many tens of gigabytes – far exceeds that of traditional web applications. And that’s just to cover inference needs – that is, the use of pre-trained AI by businesses.

The pressure on DRAM manufacturing will have an impact on internal HBM memories in the GPUs designed for AI training. These are the same circuits in both cases – they are etched on the same chains. The difference lies in the way they are assembled on a communication bus. The HBM bus is very large, because it is designed to interface directly with the pins of a computing chip, whereas the bus for DDR5 chips is smaller, to accommodate a portion of the connections behind a chipset.

60% on DDR5 prices and 100% by the end of 2026

Demand for more memory in servers is currently so great that the price of DDR5 DRAM components has rising by 60% on wholesale markets this month. Prices are set at the end of each month by manufacturers according to demand. Unusually, however, Samsung has delayed publication of its latest prices by a fortnight to take stock of the situation.

According to Tobey Gonnerman, head of memory wholesaler Fusion Worldwide, quoted by Reuters, “Most server manufacturers and datacentre operators now have to accept they will no longer get their memory components on time, and that prices for premium access to stocks are already… extreme”.

A 32GB DDR5 chip is trading at $239, up from $149 at the end of September. A 16GB chip now costs $135 and a 64GB chip $1,194.

One particular point is that Samsung, like its competitor and compatriot SK Hynix, has recently overhauled its production lines to engrave memories with greater finesse – generation 1c at Samsung (between 11 and 12 nanometres) and generation 1b at SK Hynix (between 12 and 13 nanometres). The problem is that the newness of these processes has resulted in a number of production failures. At Samsung, only 50-70% of the DRAM circuits engraved on a wafer are functional, compared with the usual 80%.

Another aggravating factor is Nvidia’s recently announced intention to use only LPDDR5 memory on its GPUs for inference by the end of 2026. This type of memory is more energy efficient than normal DDR5, which means that Nvidia’s GPUs will consume less power. But LPDDR5 is also more complicated to manufacture. According to Gonnerman, quoted by Reuters, the widespread use of LPDDR5 would mean doubling the price of memory in servers.

According to analysts, DRAM component prices are unlikely to stabilise before mid-2027.

A shortage of SSDs too

The fact that Samsung and SK Hynix are dismantling NAND production lines to install DRAM production lines will create a shortage of SSDs from the end of 2025 until the end of 2026.

The first to sound the alarm was SSD manufacturer Phison in its latest financial report, published earlier this month. According to its CEO Khein-Seng Pua, the price of a 1-terabit TLC NAND chip (it takes eight to make 1TB) is now trading at $10.70 on the wholesale market, up from $4.80 this summer. All the SSDs that Phison will be producing in 2026 have already been sold and prices will continue to rise until 2027.

Rival SanDisk also announced that all its NAND chip suppliers had increased prices by 50% between October and November. SanDisk also pointed out that it had had to wait an exceptional 15 days to obtain the updated monthly prices.

According to analysts, SSD production is not just suffering from a probable drop in production at Samsung – it also has to respond to growing demand from AI infrastructure providers, who now prefer SSDs to HDDs to load tens of GBs of RAM more quickly from large language models (LLMs).

As a result, Transcend, Innodisk and Apacer Technology, all three of which assemble NAND circuits into chips before reselling them to SSD manufacturers, have just posted unprecedented financial results – with sales up 27%, 64% and 70% in one year, respectively.

In response to this sudden shortage, server and PC manufacturer Lenovo told Bloomberg that it is stockpiling DRAM and NAND components to supply all the machines it intends to manufacture by the end of 2026. Media reports suggest its rival Acer has sent a delegation to buy components direct from Samsung’s factories, bypassing the usual wholesalers in the supply chain.



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Lenovo’s Latest Wacky Concepts Include a Laptop With a Built-In Portable Monitor

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Lenovo’s Latest Wacky Concepts Include a Laptop With a Built-In Portable Monitor


Do you like having a second screen with your computer setup? What if your laptop could carry a second screen for you? That’s the idea behind Lenovo’s latest proof of concept, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Lenovo is never shy to show off wacky, weird concept laptops. We’ve seen a PC with a transparent screen, one with a rollable OLED screen, a swiveling screen, and another with a flippy screen. At CES earlier this year, the company showed off a gaming laptop with a display that expands at the push of a button. Sometimes, these concepts turn into real products that go on sale (often in limited quantities).

At MWC 2026, Lenovo trotted out three concepts. While it’s unclear whether any of them will become real, purchasable products, there’s some unique utility here, and a peek at how computing experiences could change in the future.

A Laptop With a Built-In Portable Screen

The ThinkBook Modular AI PC has a second screen hanging magnetically off the back of the laptop, and it can show content to people sitting in front of you.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Image may contain Computer Electronics Laptop Pc Computer Hardware Computer Keyboard Hardware Monitor and Screen

This is with the second screen removed from the back and placed in front of the main display. The keyboard is removable and works via Bluetooth.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

As someone with a multi-screen setup at home and a fondness for portable monitors, the ThinkBook Modular AI PC appeals to me the most. At first glance, it looks like a normal laptop. Take a look behind, and you’ll notice there’s a second screen magnetically hanging off the back of the laptop, like a koala carrying a baby on its back.

The screen is connected to the laptop using pogo-pin connectors, so you can use it in this state to display content to people in front of you, say, if you were making a presentation during a meeting. Alternatively, you can pop this second screen off, remove a hidden kickstand resting under the laptop, and magnetically attach it to the 14-inch screen so that you have a traditional portable monitor experience. (You’ll need to connect this to the laptop via a USB-C cable in this orientation.)

If you don’t have the desk space for that orientation, you can always remove the keyboard from the base and pop the second screen there—it’ll auto-connect to the laptop via the pogo pins, and you’ll be able to use the Bluetooth keyboard to type on a dual-screen setup that resembles the Asus ZenBook Duo. The whole system is a fantastically portable method of improving productivity on the go, and the laptop isn’t too thick or cumbersome.



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The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran

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The 5 Big ‘Known Unknowns’ of Donald Trump’s New War With Iran


More recently, Iran has been a regular adversary in cyberspace—and while it hasn’t demonstrated quite the acuity of Russia or China, Iran is “good at finding ways to maximize the impact of their capabilities,” says Jeff Greene, the former executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA. Iran, in particular, famously was responsible for a series of distributed-denial-of-service attacks on Wall Street institutions that worried financial markets, and its 2012 attack on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s Rasgas marked some of the earliest destructive infrastructure cyberattacks.

Today, surely, Iran is weighing which of these tools, networks, and operatives it might press into a response—and where, exactly, that response might come. Given its history of terror campaigns and cyberattacks, there’s no reason to think that Iran’s retaliatory options are limited to missiles alone—or even to the Middle East at all.

Which leads to the biggest known unknown of all:

5. How does this end? There’s an apocryphal story about a 1970s conversation between Henry Kissinger and a Chinese leader—it’s told variously as either Mao-Tse Tung or Zhou Enlai. Asked about the legacy of the French revolution, the Chinese leader quipped, “Too soon to tell.” The story almost surely didn’t happen, but it’s useful in speaking to a larger truth particularly in societies as old as the 2,500-year-old Persian empire: History has a long tail.

As much as Trump (and the world) might hope that democracy breaks out in Iran this spring, the CIA’s official assessment in February was that if Khamenei was killed, he would be likely replaced with hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And indeed, the fact that Iran’s retaliatory strikes against other targets in the Middle East continued throughout Saturday, even after the death of many senior regime officials—including, purportedly, the defense minister—belied the hope that the government was close to collapse.

The post-World War II history of Iran has surely hinged on three moments and its intersections with American foreign policy—the 1953 CIA coup, the 1979 revolution that removed the shah, and now the 2026 US attacks that have killed its supreme leader. In his recent bestselling book King of Kings, on the fall of the shah, longtime foreign correspondent Scott Anderson writes of 1979, “If one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French, and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”

It is hard not to think today that we are living through a moment equally important in ways that we cannot yet fathom or imagine—and that we should be especially wary of any premature celebration or declarations of success given just how far-reaching Iran’s past turmoils have been.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly bragged about how he sees the military and Trump administration’s foreign policy as sending a message to America’s adversaries: “F-A-F-O,” playing off the vulgar colloquialism. Now, though, it’s the US doing the “F-A” portion in the skies over Iran—and the long arc of Iran’s history tells us that we’re a long, long way from the “F-O” part where we understand the consequences.


Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.



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This Backyard Smoker Delivers Results Even a Pitmaster Would Approve Of

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This Backyard Smoker Delivers Results Even a Pitmaster Would Approve Of


While my love of smoked meats is well-documented, my own journey into actually tending the fire started just last spring when I jumped at the opportunity to review the Traeger Woodridge Pro. When Recteq came calling with a similar offer to check out the Flagship 1600, I figured it would be a good way to stay warm all winter.

While the two smokers have a lot in common, the Recteq definitely feels like an upgrade from the Traeger I’ve been using. Not only does it have nearly twice the cooking space, but the huge pellet hopper, rounded barrel, and proper smokestack help me feel like a real pitmaster.

The trade-off is losing some of the usability features that make the Woodridge Pro a great first smoker. The setup isn’t as quite as simple, and the larger footprint and less ergonomic conditions require a little more experience or patience. With both options, excellent smoked meat is just a few button presses away, but speaking as someone with both in their backyard, I’ve been firing up the Recteq more often.

Getting Settled

Photograph: Brad Bourque

Setting up the Recteq wasn’t as time-consuming as the Woodridge, but it was more difficult to manage on my own. Some of the steps, like attaching the bull horns to the lid, or flipping the barrel onto its stand, would really benefit from a patient friend or loved one. Like most smokers, you’ll need to run a burn-in cycle at 400 degrees Fahrenheit to make sure there’s nothing left over from manufacturing or shipping. Given the amount of setup time and need to cool down the smoker after, I would recommend setting this up Friday afternoon if you want to smoke on a Saturday.



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