Phison's CEO K.S. Pua: Memory Shortage in 2027 to Be More Severe Than This Year

In a recent interview, Phison Electronics CEO K.S. Pua stated that as AI data centers, on-premise AI, and AI PCs continue to roll out, the demand for memory will keep expanding. He noted that the industry's biggest challenge is no longer demand, but rather the supply side's inability to keep up with the rapidly growing demand.

Regarding the growth in memory demand driven by AI, K.S. Pua pointed out that the global user base for AI is still expanding, and usage frequency is expected to see a leap in the future. Currently, most users interact with AI roughly every two hours; however, he predicts that within two years, the interval between interactions could shrink to just ten minutes. While current human-machine interaction relies mostly on text, future application scenarios will gradually evolve towards video and multimodal applications, driving an exponential increase in the scale of Tokens and various types of data.

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.

Beyond the sustained growth in AI data center demand, K.S. Pua is also optimistic about the development of on-premise AI. He noted that many large enterprises have begun to feel the strain of excessive cloud costs. Once companies can no longer bear these cloud expenses, they will start shifting towards on-premise deployment, triggering a wave of local AI procurement that will become a crucial growth driver for the memory market.
Regarding AI PCs, K.S. Pua believes the market is still in its nascent stage. The biggest challenges at present are how to reduce costs, establish a complete software ecosystem, and ensure supply. With NVIDIA also beginning to venture into the AI PC space, widespread adoption is expected to be just around the corner.