According to South Korean media citing SK hynix and fire authorities on the 12th, a fire broke out around 9:55 a.m. (local time) on the second floor of Building M15X, located within SK Hynix's Cheongju plant in Heungdeok District, Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province. After the fire broke out, employees from M15 and M15X were immediately evacuated outdoors. Reports indicate that the company's firefighting team extinguished the fire in its early stages. Cheongju issued a disaster alert, advising nearby residents to avoid the area and vehicles to take detours due to concerns over potential fluoride leaks. According to the latest news, the fire department stated that the investigation found no gas leakage. SK hynix stated that initial control has been completed, and the company is investigating the specific circumstances, adding that production equipment is operating normally. A fire also broke out at SK hynix's Cheongju Site 4 on the 1st of this month.

Rather than building a new factory, SK Hynix is upgrading the existing production lines at its Cheongju M15 plant—which currently produces 176-, 238-, and 321-layer products—and investing in converting them into 375-layer production lines.

AWS has announced that Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances powered by new AWS Graviton5 processors are now available. Both of them are powered by Graviton5, the most powerful and most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built. With 192 cores, a 5x larger L3 cache, up to 33% lower inter-core latency, and DDR5 Memory delivering high bandwidth, Graviton5 helps agents spend less time waiting on CPU-bound steps, processing more instructions, handling large numbers of concurrent environments, and keeping accelerators moving. As the first CPU in the AWS fleet to support the latest generation of PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 Memory, AWS Graviton5 instances deliver the fastest Memory of any processor instances in the cloud, and 5 times more L3 cache compared to the previous generation.

According to media reports citing industry analyst insights, Apple is considering raising the price of the iPhone 18 Pro Max due to cost pressures from the global storage price hike, as part of its overall cost optimization strategy for the iPhone product line. It is reported that the starting price of the iPhone 18 Pro Max is currently expected to be $1,299, positioning it as Apple's most feature-packed mainstream smartphone yet. Furthermore, given Apple's active investment in on-device AI and Apple Intelligence, it is likely that entry-level and lower-tier models will adopt 12GB RAM paired with the technically newer M12+ display technology, rather than opting for 8GB RAM paired with a proven M14 OLED panel. More Memory unlocks larger AI models, better multitasking, and future-proofing for upcoming software features. The adoption of the M12+ OLED panel is primarily aimed at enhancing performance in the most critical areas, optimizing resource allocation to control costs, while maintaining display quality.

According to Korean media reports, Samsung Electronics is pushing ahead with the construction of an advanced semiconductor packaging (back-end process) plant in Gwangju, marking the company's first semiconductor production base in the Honam region (its current facilities are mainly concentrated in the Chungcheong region). This will be Samsung Electronics' first new packaging facility in 35 years since the establishment of its Onyang plant. The project is also expected to include front-end production lines for DRAM and NAND flash Memory. The investment plan is reportedly scheduled for discussion on the 29th during a meeting chaired by President Lee Jae-myung, which will include heads of major corporate groups including Samsung.

Since the beginning of this month, emotional and aggressive pricing tactics in the spot market have noticeably decreased compared to the previous two months, with the overall market trending toward rationality. As prices for low-end channel resources gradually stabilize and quotes show slight increases, alongside emerging signs of a rebound in retail prices for branded DDR5 UDIMM, the channel market as a whole has begun to stabilize. This week, DDR5 UDIMM in the channel market were the first to see a slight price rebound. However, given that it is currently the end of the quarter, there is a possibility that some manufacturers may accelerate shipments to meet their performance targets, potentially leading to continued market volatility.

Biwin announced that it has signed a routine procurement contract with a Memory chip manufacturer. Under the agreement, Biwin will purchase enterprise-grade flash chips from the supplier at specified volumes, prices, and timelines.

The core objective of the plan is to increase monthly DRAM capacity from the current approximately 550,000 wafers (which includes around 200,000 wafers produced at the Wuxi plant in China) to roughly one million wafers by 2030. This expansion will be heavily concentrated in the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster.

According to foreign media reports, the latest analysis from SemiAnalysis suggests that NVIDIA may use a smaller 96GB SOCAMM for its Vera CPU, rather than the previously anticipated 192GB. As a result, the total SOCAMM DRAM capacity in the Rubin NVL72 is expected to drop from approximately 55TB per rack to around 28TB. The change lowers estimated rack cost from $7.6 million to $6.8 million and reduces total cost of ownership from $4.16/hour/GPU to $3.90/hr/GPU.

With its eighth-generation TPU, Google breaks from the tradition of single-chip iteration by splitting training and inference into two distinct chips: the TPU 8t designed for large-scale training, and the TPU 8i optimized for inference and AI agents. This enables precise matching of the different demands of AI scenarios.

Compared to the 400+ layer solutions pursued by some competitors, Kioxia's calculations show that its 332-layer design offers approximately 10% lower cost per GB, about 10% improved power efficiency, and roughly 35% higher cell reliability.

Chey reiterated that the Memory supply bottlenecks triggered by the widespread adoption of AI are expected to persist until 2030. He pointed out that not only is global capital pouring into AI data center construction, but Nvidia's upcoming AI PC architecture will also create rigid demand for high-capacity Memory, providing long-term growth momentum for the Memory market.

K.S. Pua also emphasized that AI development inevitably requires both DRAM and NAND Flash, and the larger the AI model, the higher the demand for Memory capacity. As enterprises invest heavily in purchasing GPUs, revenue generation leads to data creation, which in turn drives Memory demand. Although major manufacturers are continuously expanding production capacity, the newly added capacity still falls far short of the demand growth. He expects the tight supply-demand situation to remain unresolved in the short term, with the Memory shortage next year expected to be even more severe than this year.

At COMPUTEX 2026, Phison announced a collaboration with Intel to integrate its Pascari aiDAPTIV Memory expansion technology into Intel's AI PC platform. It overcomes the traditional limitation of DRAM capacity in PCs, enabling AI PCs to run larger Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and agentic AI applications locally. According to Phison, aiDAPTIV leverages high-performance NAND Flash working with DRAM to create a novel AI Memory architecture, reducing the system Memory capacity required for large models. Internal tests show that a system equipped with aiDAPTIV requires only 16GB of DRAM to run an AI model with 26 billion (26B) parameters. Without this technology, 32GB of DRAM would be needed to handle the same workload.

Consequently, Memory prices will retain some upward momentum; smartphone and PC Memory prices will follow suit passively, albeit with narrowing quarterly increases, presenting an overall trend of shrinking volume but rising prices.