Don’t be surprised if RAM prices go up next year. As reported by Taiwan’s TechNews (via Tom’s Hardware), memory giant Micron suffered a one-hour power outage at one of its DDR4 and LPDDR4 fabrication plants on Thursday, which obviously hindered production to some degree. While the company is still busy inspecting the exact level of losses, critics believe that the incident will lead to increased memory prices for 2021.
“[…] the factory’s monthly production capacity is 125K a month, accounting for 8.8% of the global total monthly DRAM production capacity of 1,418K,” TechNews noted. “The loss of power outage without warning this time may affect DRAM market conditions.”
“Micron confirmed that a power outage occurred at the Taoyuan DRAM plant on December 3, and the plant immediately activated the safety protection mechanism,” a statement from the company reads. “At present, the equipment has been operating normally after the power is restored, and it is expected that the factory will resume production within a few days.”
Coincidentally, a report published by South Korea’s Pulse (via r/hardware) on Wednesday hinted at a significant rise in memory demand in 2021. The global DRAM market is expected to grow by 15 to 20 percent.