With the rapid development of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, the demand for high-speed and high-capacity memory has increased dramatically. HBM's high bandwidth and low power consumption make it ideal for applications such as graphics processing units (GPUs), high-performance computing (HPCs), and AI servers.
By packaging DRAM in a 3D stack, HBM is able to provide much higher bandwidth and storage capacity than traditional DRAM technology. This advanced memory structure not only greatly improves data transfer efficiency, but also helps to reduce the communication latency between memory and processor, thereby speeding up data processing.
According to the research institute Yole Group**,The HBM market size will be about $14.1 billion in 2024, $19.9 billion in 2025, and $37.7 billion in 2027。By 2027, when HBM's output value reaches $37.7 billion, it will be 79% of the current DRAM's annual output value. However, DRAM is declining right now, so this would be an overestimation of the importance of HBM. If the maximum DRAM output value of 99.7 billion US dollars is taken as the benchmark, then the global HBM scale in 2024 and 2027 will account for 14% and 38% of the total DRAM market size. Regardless of the foundation, it can be seen that the soil of HBM is fertile for manufacturers, even without considering profit margins. There is no doubt about itThe world's top three storage factories will all storm this land, and it is unlikely to expand the production capacity of old products. If there is not much capacity added in the future, the DRAM profit margin will be relatively stable in the future, and the surplus will probably fluctuate between 50 and 100% capacity utilization. As for the next question, will the production capacity not be enough, because it is crowded out by HBM? It shouldn't be. Because the average unit price of HBM is more than 5 times that of traditional memory, it will be smaller when converted into a proportion of production capacity, not to mention that there is still a lot of idle capacity to use. On the whole, there are two conclusionsIt's been a long time since the DRAM market has jumped up and upgraded its products. When large factories concentrate on HBM production capacity, the supply and demand situation of the overall DRAM industry in the future will be better than in the past. If the long-term is healthy, judging from the DRAM industry revenue just shown, then the industry is still at the bottom stage and is waiting for recovery.