The price increase was too high and the HBM capacity of Rubin graphics cards was reduced: up to half

Kuai Technology reported on August 11 that the explosion of AI demand has driven up memory prices several times this year. High-end HBM memory is firmly in the hands of the three giants. However, such crazy price increases have begun to backfire. NVIDIA is reducing HBM usage. NVIDIA's AI graphics card is switching from Blackwell to the Rubin generation. It was originally equipped with extremely luxurious HBM4 capacity. However, because the price of HBM memory has increased sharply and the supply is insufficient, NVIDIA has also begun to reduce the HBM configuration. UBS's latest report claims that the HBM4 capacity of each GPU in Rubin Ultra's VR300 is 384GB, which may be increased to 512GB in the future, but it is still halved compared to the originally expected 768GB. Despite this, total HBM demand next year is still high, as GPU shipments are expected to increase from 11 million units to 12.6 million units, and NVIDIA is still expected to consume 25.1 billion Gb of HBM memory in 2027. Another big customer is Google. Its TPU chips will also be equipped with a large amount of HBM video memory. It is also expected to require 19.2 billion Gb next year. The total global HBM demand is approximately 61.5 billion Gb, a year-on-year increase of 91%. If NVIDIA does not take measures to reduce the HBM capacity of a single card, the gap will be larger next year, and Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron will inevitably become tougher in price negotiations. Such capacity reduction in NVIDIA has triggered price cuts by SK Hynix. Next year's HBM will only increase by 50%, while Samsung's increase will still be as high as 80%. NVIDIA has already divided into one manufacturer. However, it is still difficult to completely reverse the price trend of the memory chip market. 2027 will be the year with the largest gap, and prices will reach their peak. Supply and demand will begin to be more balanced at the end of next year. Oversupply will occur as soon as 2028, and prices will fall. However, because the base of price increases in recent years has been very high, it will take a long time for prices to return to mid-2025.