A PC giant is visiting storage vendors intensively and has been promised stable supply

On December 22, as the global memory chip market has entered the most intense price upward cycle in the past five years, a supply chain source revealed that a leading global PC giant recently sent senior executives to visit major global memory chip manufacturers, including Samsung Electronics (Samsung Electronics), SK Hynix (SK Hynix), and Micron (Micron), and has reached initial supply guarantee agreements with these suppliers.

The source declined to say which is the leading PC manufacturer, but industry analysts believe that only Lenovo Group or HP can obtain supply guarantees from storage vendors at this time. The global market share of Lenovo Group's PC business in the latest quarter was 25.5%, compared to 19.8% for HP. In an interview with Bloomberg TV on December 18, Lenovo Group CFO Zheng Xiaoming said that due to the surge in memory demand for AI data centers and cloud hardware, the tight supply of memory chips and rising prices, the company's spare parts inventory is about 50% higher than usual.

Memory chips are a key component of products such as PCs, servers, and mobile phones. According to the report data released by Morgan Stanley on November 16, the spot price of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) soared by more than 260% in just two months, while the spot price of NAND flash memory, which is the core of solid state drives (SSD), has also risen by more than 50% since the beginning of 2025.

Due to the rise in memory chip prices, the world's leading PC manufacturers have all sent out comprehensive price increases: Lenovo Group, Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, etc. have all issued early warnings to customers, confirming that the retail price of PC terminals will generally increase by 15%-20%, and contract negotiations will resume.

The supply chain source mentioned above said that stable access to memory chips is becoming one of the key factors in determining whether PC manufacturers can stay on the table. Since the second half of 2025, delivery times for DRAM and NAND Flash core models have been significantly extended, and stocks of some mainstream capacities and specifications have almost disappeared.

“Leading manufacturers with scale advantages and long-term procurement agreements are still able to maintain relatively stable supply; however, for small and medium-sized PC manufacturers with limited financial strength and small procurement scale, the problem is much more serious; they are facing the dilemma of not being able to get the goods even if they have money. Currently, mainstream storage vendors give priority to long-term large customer orders, and orders from small to medium customers are either delayed or forced to accept higher prices and more unstable delivery cycles.” This person said.