Acer CEO Jason Chen is offering a notably rosier timeline than the rest of the memory industry, predicting that price hikes tied to the ongoing RAM shortage could begin to reverse by late 2027.
Chen made the comments in an interview with DigiTimes, as reported by TechSpot, putting him at odds with executives at several major memory manufacturers who've painted a much bleaker picture.
The shortage has already had widespread effects. Since last year, surging demand from AI data center buildouts has consumed available memory supply and pushed DRAM prices up roughly fivefold, a squeeze that's rippled out to PCs, smartphones, graphics cards, and game consoles, along with the CPUs and motherboards built around them. As TechSpot notes, a recent industry study found the memory market now resembles, on a per-unit basis, conditions from nearly two decades ago.
Per TechSpot's reporting, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said earlier this year that tight supply would persist beyond 2027, while SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung projected shortages peaking in 2027 and supply remaining tight through 2030. Adata chairman Chen Li-bai went further still, forecasting elevated prices for another full decade despite expansion plans across the industry.
Chen sees those forecasts differently, arguing they reflect an incentive to protect margins rather than a genuine supply problem. He contends that the supply of most RAM and SSD types has already caught up with demand, and that real shortages are now confined mostly to high-end components like the fastest DDR5 modules and chips such as Nvidia's N1X, according to TechSpot.
Even so, Chen still expects PC prices to climb another 5 percent to 20 percent before the year is out, with a peak in the first half of 2027 ahead of any relief. Part of his optimism hinges on cheaper supply coming from Chinese manufacturers like CXMT. Apple has reportedly been considering CXMT as a supplier despite the company’s inclusion on the Pentagon's blacklist, TechSpot noted.
Chen's prediction runs counter to what analysts told Mashable in our previous reporting, which suggested prices would likely rise before they fall, with elevated pricing persisting through 2027 and potentially into 2028.
Jitesh Ubrani, an analyst director with the International Data Corporation, told Mashable at the time:
"The memory supply will remain tight from a device's perspective for the remainder of 2026 and well into 2027," he said. "We will see some alleviation in 2028, but keep in mind that prices will continue to rise throughout. And even in 2028, assuming this new [memory] capacity comes online and is able to provide some alleviation, we don't see device prices dropping significantly."
That leaves consumers with a wide range of outlooks to sort through — from Acer's best-case scenario of falling prices by late 2027 to warnings that meaningful relief may not arrive until 2028, or could take considerably longer. For now, anyone shopping for a new PC should probably expect prices to keep climbing before they have any real chance of coming back down.