Quick Summary
• These things can change at any moment nowadays, but the biggest economic story of the year might not be elevated energy prices, after all. Elevated prices for memory chips may...
Additional Context
These things can change at any moment nowadays, but the biggest economic story of the year might not be elevated energy prices, after all. Elevated prices for memory chips may end up being the most lasting trend to emerge in 2026.
Share prices for chipmakers like Micron surged throughout H1 thanks to skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips, a trajectory that led Apple to announce it would be raising prices on certain products. This is the immediate backdrop for another trend I’ve been writing about all year, the change in the semiconductor capital equipment (semicap) market that I’ve framed as an “insurrection”. The ability to design semiconductor devices in 2.5D/3D has led to innovations surrounding chipmakers’ fanned out and/or stacked packaging of memory dies and compute dies,