GEOPOLITICS
HELIUM
MEMORY
Your next RAM stick will cost more because of GPUs, and helium is not helping
At the France-IX Tour Lyon in June 2026, I said that your next RAM stick would cost more… because of GPUs. I had not taken the time to spell out the logic.
Gillo Alain Malpart (Mavana) has written it far better than I could have put it, and goes even further.
The starting point: HBM, the memory that feeds AI accelerators, takes up around three times more production capacity than DDR5 for the same volume.
In practice, what is happening is a near doubling of DRAM prices in the first quarter of 2026 and lead times of more than 40 weeks on some references.
Three players (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) account for 90% of global memory production (Europe, for its part, produces 0% of the memory in question here).
And it does not stay in the data centres: Apple has raised its prices by 18% on MacBooks, and by up to 32% on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra. Municipal projects (charging points, water leak detectors) are not getting off the ground for lack of components.
Let me add a factor that is dear to me: helium.
Qatar accounts for around a third of global production, and the crisis around Hormuz has cut supply by nearly 30%, with prices up 40 to 100% in a few weeks. It will take years to repair the Ras Laffan facilities. Yet helium is used to cool wafers, to detect leaks and to stabilise lithography environments.
No pain, no gain? Well, here it is: no gas, no chips.
Two dependencies but one conclusion: physical constraints always end up reaching your infrastructure budget.
Illustration: a little souvenir from Lyon (photo from the post)
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