As 2026 commences, the global memory market appears to be entering a new “super cycle,” shaped by the convergence of multiple structural forces. On the surface, the market’s strong recovery is widely attributed to aggressive procurement of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) by hyperscale data center operators, tightening supply and prices rising for both DRAM and NAND. Beneath this apparent demand surge, however, a more fundamental force is reshaping the market: a rapidly propagating “crowding-out effect” spreading throughout the semiconductor supply chain.
In a recent interview, Martin Lin, head of marketing at Macronix, described this phenomenon as an AI-driven “butterfly effect.” Surging demand for AI processors has absorbed a substantial share of industry capacity, spanning wafer fabrication, packaging and testing, substrates, probe cards, and critical materials. Across the supply chain, capacity allocation has increasingly prioritized AI-related products, compressing production and testing schedules for non-AI memory devices. In some cases, normalization has been pushed to the end of the year or beyond, triggering a chain reaction of widespread shortages and sharply extended lead times. Lin emphasized that this situation does not represent a short-term imbalance caused by any single product category, but rather a systemic crowding-out effect resulting from large-scale resource reallocation across the entire semiconductor ecosystem.
This wave of disruption has not only reshaped the DRAM and NAND markets; it has also brought eMMC—long viewed over the past several years as a technology in gradual decline—back to the center of industry attention. Against this major market inflection point, Macronix is leveraging its full portfolio of NOR, SLC NAND, 3D NAND, and eMMC solutions, offering capacity coverage from Mb and Gb to GB. This comprehensive flash portfolio enables customers to identify and deploy appropriate memory solutions in a single step, even under highly volatile market conditions, positioning Macronix as a stabilizing force amid AI-driven supply chain restructuring.
