IT News on September 29th, TrendForce (JIBANG) today announced an upward revision to its price forecasts for HBM memory for 2027, expecting its average price to see a year-on-year increase of 121% next year.

Overall, the demand for AI servers continues to expand, and the situation where HBM competes with the general DRAM products for limited production capacity will not change; however, with the iterative upgrades of AI chips, the proportion of HBM4 with higher average prices is gradually increasing, and HBM4E will also gradually increase in volume, driving up prices.

Multiple AI XPU industry players have recently discussed replacing the original 12Hi with a lower-stack 8Hi in some of their products. Institutions believe that 8Hi offers a relatively balanced performance, supply, and cost profile, and are expected to become the preferred option for some companies in 2027.

However, for 8Hi HBM, the Base Die required under the same total capacity is 50% more than that of the 12Hi scheme. This means that the unit cost of 8Hi HBM may be 10% to 20% higher than that of the 12Hi product.

Overall, although adjusting the HBM stacking layer count can partially alleviate the overall cost pressure of XPU, it is difficult to reverse the trend of a significant increase in the overall price of HBM.