At the beginning of November, overall spot market demand for Memory continued the sluggish condition from last month, with actual transaction remaining weak. Channel consumer SSD and embedded eMMC prices continued to decline slightly, while industry SSD, Memory modules, and LPDDR4X/5X prices were generally flat.

Apple announced financial results for its fiscal 2026 fourth quarter ended September 26, 2026. According to Apple CFO Kevan Parekh, excluding tariff rebates from the June and September fiscal quarters, both company and product gross margins declined by about 1 percentage point quarter over quarter, driven primarily by rising Memory cost. Apple issued gross margin guidance of 45% to 46% for the next fiscal quarter, below analyst expectation, with the decline mainly due to rising Memory cost and investments related to Siri AI.

Silicon Motion announced its financial results for the third quarter of 2026. During the reporting period, the company achieved revenue of $560 million, setting a record high for the fourth consecutive quarter, up 24% QoQ and 131% YoY; Non-GAAP net income was $149 million, up 79.4% QoQ and 341% YoY.

Historically, the Double 11 shopping festival is an important period for 3C sales. However, SSDs, a key component for channel PC systems and DIY builds, have seen sharp price increases since Q4 last year, tracking the rise in upstream resource costs. Although prices turned lower in Q2 due to weak seasonal demand, the cumulative gains from the earlier rally remain substantial, and current price levels are still significantly above those before last year’s increase.Even with platform subsidies and additional promotions during Double 11, many consumers still view SSDs as expensive. Unless purchases are urgent, most users remain reluctant to buy.

According to South Korean media outlet ZDNet, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix plan to begin mass production and shipments of 8-layer HBM4 products to Nvidia starting in the second quarter of 2027. HBM4 is the sixth generation of high-bandwidth Memory. Currently, the main HBM4 products in mass production at both companies remain the 12-layer HBM4 variant.

According to foreign media reports, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated in a recent interview that he believes the likelihood of an oversupply in the DRAM market around 2029 is low.

According to Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are upgrading their NAND flash production lines at factories in China. The goal is to raise stacking levels to above 200 layers, bringing the technology level of their Chinese plants closer to that of their South Korean facilities.

This week, the spot Memory market showed a divergent trend. 16GB/32GB DDR5 UDIMM continued to see slight price increases due to rising resource costs. Conversely, the LPDDR4X market faced downward pressure on 8GB pricing, driven by ample supply and persistent weak demand. Prices for other finished Memory products remained largely flat.

Apple CEO John Ternus stated in a recent interview that the current Memory supply shortage has become a clear crisis, and that Apple's fundamental position is to evaluate and consider all viable options. His remarks are seen as a response to national security concerns raised by the U.S. Congress regarding the testing of China-made Memory chips.

SK hynix disclosed that its research team focused on analog compute-in-Memory (A-CiM), and proposed an approach based on 3D FeNAND that co-optimizes cell, non-cell, and page schemes. SK hynix's research team found that 3D FeNAND outperforms conventional 3D CTN NAND in precisely controlling multiple current levels at a lower power, making it a Memory architecture highly suitable for A-CiM. Under the same chip-area constraints, it also delivered approximately 10 to 20 times higher throughput and around 4,000 to 5,000 times greater energy efficiency than conventional 3D arrays.

Marvell Unveils second-generation Structera X, which are industry-first Six-channel CXL 3.2 Memory Expanders for AI Inference. Second-generation Marvell Structera X 3406 and 3506 CXL 3.2 Memory expanders add six DDR4/DDR5 channels (50% more than the prior generation) and PCIe Gen 6 connectivity, supporting up to 9TB of DDR4 or 6TB of DDR5 per controller.

Following the National Day holiday, the current spot Memory market has yet to regain momentum, with trading sentiment remaining sluggish. Finished product prices showed mixed performance: driven by rising resource costs, most channel and industry Memory modules saw slight price increases, while embedded eMMC/UFS products with capacities of 64GB and below experienced price declines this week due to persistently weak demand and continuously falling trade prices for related finished goods.

According to industry sources cited by South Korean media, Samsung Electronics is internally developing three types of z-NAND flash Memory. In addition to zNAND-O, for which its model has already been publicly demonstrated, these also include zNAND-T and zNAND-I. It is reported that zNAND-T is designed for high throughput, featuring maximized bandwidth to meet the needs of high-capacity, high-performance AI data centers. zNAND-I, meanwhile, maximizes IOPS. Although wider bandwidth allows large amounts of data to be processed at once, higher IOPS means more data I/O operations can be completed per second.

According to media reports, Meta has recently presented an experimental Memory compression solution called CRAM (Compressed RAM) at LPC 2026. The solution aims to keep compressed data in Memory form, thereby reducing the software overhead associated with traditional Swap path, rather than simply replacing ZRAM or zswap. The core idea of CRAM is to provide hardware-compressed Memory to Linux as a special type of NUMA Memory, instead of emulating it as a block storage device. It is said that, in pure read scenarios, CRAM's throughput performance is up to 452 times higher than that of the current mainstream ZRAM, and its actual operating speed is already extremely close to native DRAM.

CFM has recently released its latest quarterly report, "2026Q3 Global Memory Market Summary and Q4 Outlook". The report states that in the fourth quarter of 2026, the quarter-on-quarter price increases for server DDR5 and eSSD are expected to fall within the ranges of 0%–10% and 0%–10%, respectively; price increases for Mobile LPDDR4X/5X and eMMC/UFS are estimated at roughly 0%–5% and 0%–3%; price increases for PC DDR5/LPDDR5X are expected to be about 0%–10%, and the price increase for cSSD is expected to be around 0%–3%.