TrendForce: Graphics DRAM contract prices will continue to rise in the third quarter
NVIDIA and AMD have released a series of new graphics cards recently, and the new generation of game consoles are also equipped with large-capacity graphics memory as memory. The graphics DRAM supply is beginning to be tight. According to Trendforce’s market research, contract prices in the graphics DRAM market will continue to rise in the near future, and the order fulfillment rate of some small and medium-sized customers is only about 30%. The tight supply is expected to continue into the third quarter and will increase the graphics DRAM contract prices by 8% to 13%.
In fact, the contract price of graphics DRAM products has been rising since the beginning of this year. The increase in the first quarter is about 5-10%, and the second quarter is expected to reach 20-25%, and the third quarter is expected to increase by 8-13%. There are four main reasons for the price increase. The first is that the PC market demand is quite strong, and e-sports related products are especially obvious. The second is NVIDIA’s strategy of bundling GPU memory sales so that it can obtain a larger amount of original factory supplies, which makes it more difficult for other customers to buy. The third is that the graphics memory used by Xbox Series X and PS5 hosts is 16Gb GDDR6, while the common one on graphics cards is 8Gb, and the two cannot be used interactively. The DRAM demand of the server is picking up, and the priority of producing video memory is not so high, which leads to the occupation of production capacity.
In the spot market, the price of GDDR6 has fallen from last month, but it is still twice as high as the contract price, while GDDR5 is almost the same as the contract price. The reason for the price reduction is that there is a certain relationship between the spot price and the contract price. The main reason is that the virtual currency is currently weak, and the demand for graphics cards in the mines has decreased. In this way, more new graphics cards will flow to the consumer market, and there will be less demand for old graphics cards that use GDDR5 video memory, which makes the price of GDDR5 video memory plummet. At present, game consoles and mainstream graphics cards use GDDR6 memory, and its demand is still very large, and the decline is not as obvious as GDDR5.
