NVIDIA Raises AI Server Prices by Over 15% Amid Memory Shortage... What Lies Ahead for Samsung and SK Hynix?

NVIDIA, the undisputed powerhouse in AI chips and the world's top company by market capitalization, has ultimately raised the white flag.

Bloomberg reported that NVIDIA has notified major corporate clients of its plan to raise AI server prices by more than 15%.

The price hike will apply to systems shipping early next year.

Core next-generation products, including NVIDIA's flagship AI server systems Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell, are included in the price increase.

The price hike is driven by a severe shortage of memory semiconductors.

No matter how advanced NVIDIA's AI chips are, pairing them with memory semiconductors like High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and DRAM is essential to achieve peak performance.

However, as investments in AI data centers surge worldwide, the demand for these memory chips has far outpaced supply.

Given this situation, the bargaining power of Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron—which tightly control the global memory semiconductor market—has skyrocketed, putting even industry titan NVIDIA in an untenable position.

In the end, NVIDIA began passing that burden on to its clients.

Apple and Qualcomm have already raised product prices citing semiconductor shortages.

The scale of the AI infrastructure business continues to expand, with projections showing that AI servers will account for over 60% of global memory consumption by 2030.

The demand share for data center DRAM has also jumped from 32% five years ago to 50% last year.

Amid this trend, prices for related equipment are rising across the board, fueling expectations that big tech companies will face hefty bills.

Some forecasts even suggest that the construction cost for a 1-gigawatt (GW) data center alone could increase by at least 5 billion dollars.

A massive obstacle known as a cost bomb has been added to the construction of AI data centers, which are already struggling with power supply issues and talent shortages.

(Reported by Yeo Hyeon-gyo | Video by Na Hong-hee | Graphics by Lee Jung-joo | Produced by SBS Digital News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.