Samsung expects the global memory chip shortage to worsen through 2027 and not ease until at least 2028, the company said in its second-quarter 2026 earnings briefing on 29 July 2026. For anyone buying a phone, a console, a PC or anything with memory inside, that timeline matters.

Samsung controls roughly a third of the world's memory supply, according to the company's own figures, which means its production forecast effectively sets the ceiling for how many devices the industry can build in the coming years.

The shortage is not about a factory problem. It is about where the factory lines are pointed. Most memory manufacturing capacity is now booked for High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM — the specialised chips used in AI datacentres — leaving little dedicated to the consumer-grade memory that goes into smartphones, laptops and gaming hardware, Eurogamer reported on 3 August 2026. Samsung said AI companies have been sharing their medium- and long-term demand forecasts to help secure a consistent chip supply, a sign of how tightly the AI build-out is gripping the supply chain.

The numbers explain why Samsung is comfortable pointing its production at servers. The company posted record-breaking memory earnings in Q2 2026, recording all-time high bit sales for both DRAM and NAND, according to its earnings presentation. Overall chip profit rose more than 250-fold to US$61.7 billion, Reuters reported. Samsung's Memory Business said it expects robust demand in the second half of 2026, driven by continued AI infrastructure spending and broader adoption of AI, per its earnings announcement.

That AI-driven windfall has a flip side. Samsung's mobile division swung to its first quarterly loss in Q2 2026, Reuters reported. Global smartphone shipments fell 11% in the same quarter to their lowest level for the period since 2013, a decline Reuters attributed to the prolonged memory shortage.

The chain runs in a straight line. AI companies buy the high-margin memory. Samsung allocates its lines accordingly. Consumer-grade memory gets squeezed. Fewer phones, consoles and PCs ship at prices people will pay.

For the games industry specifically, the squeeze lands on hardware. Consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S use custom memory configurations that compete for the same manufacturing capacity as other consumer electronics. When that capacity is redirected toward AI servers, the chips that go into game consoles — and the phones that increasingly host cloud gaming — get harder to source and more expensive to buy.

Samsung's forecast puts a date on what many in the supply chain have already felt: no quick fix, and no relief before 2028 at the earliest.