Taiwan’s Compal warns rising memory prices to impact industry into 2027

(Corrects chairman’s first name to Ray, not Rey, in paragraph 8)

By Wen-Yee Lee

TAIPEI, Jan 22 (Reuters) – Taiwan’s Compal, a contract manufacturer for notebook and personal computers, said surging memory prices would continue into 2027 and have a significant impact on the industry.

The company said it expected global notebook and personal computer shipments to fall by a low-single-digit percentage in 2026.

“We believe the total market will be impacted for sure,” Chief Executive Officer Anthony Peter Bonadero said, adding Compal’s own notebook and PC business was expected to be flat or see slight growth, supported by its customer mix.

“It’s a true super cycle (in memory chips) that we haven’t really seen,” said Bonadero.

The world’s top three memory chip producers – Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron – have said in recent months that they are struggling to keep up with demand, as a boom in artificial intelligence data center rollouts has tightened supply of memory chips.

“We expect to see more of what we saw towards the end of ’25 with pricing volatility in the memory space, with the big three memory manufacturers prioritizing AI server high-bandwidth-memory (HBM),” Bonadero said.

Memory chips typically account for about 15% to 18% of a PC’s materials cost, but the share could now rise to as much as 35% to 40%, he said.

The computer maker has also been restructuring to expand its AI-related and AI server business, Chairman Ray Chen said.

Compal last year approved $500 million to expand operations in the U.S., with a factory in Texas expected to be completed by the second quarter and to begin producing AI servers later this year.

The company also said that customers wanted supply to be more geographically diversified, adding that it was currently expanding capacity in the U.S., Taiwan and Vietnam.

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee. Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and MarkPotter)