Silicon Motion chief warns memory tightness could stretch into 2028

Silicon Motion's Wallace Kou said the global memory shortage is likely to worsen in 2027 and may not begin easing until the second half of 2028. His outlook links the pressure to AI inference, which is broadening demand beyond training clusters and into more persistent deployment workloads. The comment is important because Silicon Motion sits close to storage and controller demand, giving it visibility into customer planning for NAND, SSDs and related memory supply. If that view proves correct, buyers should expect elevated pricing and constrained availability to remain part of the market through at least the next planning cycle, particularly for components tied to AI infrastructure and higher-performance storage.