Samsung moved fast to deny it was about to slap an 80 per cent price rise on every memory product it sells.
Taiwanese newspaper United Daily News says Samsung and several memory module manufacturing partners are calling the 80 per cent figure a complete fabrication.
That does not mean prices are staying flat. The report says Samsung, like other chipmakers, is raising prices as supply tightens, but not with a blanket 80 per cent jump.
The panic started after an alleged memo from a Samsung distributor surfaced, saying that “due to significant changes in the global semiconductor market”, all Samsung memory products would take an 80 per cent hike.
The document picked up speed when an X investment account reposted it and called it confirmed via a “DS Giheung employee’s firsthand account”. DS Giheung is shorthand for Samsung’s Giheung Device Solutions campus, which handles manufacturing and memory design.
United Daily News reports Samsung has denied any across-the-board 80 per cent rise on its full memory line-up. It adds that some distributors have raised prices on their end, but manufacturers interviewed said they had seen nothing from Samsung about a formal increase.
The wider market has been ugly enough to make the fake memo feel plausible. DRAM prices rose 171 per cent year on year from 2024 to 2025, driven by AI data centre demand squeezing supply.
The report also says Samsung’s prices for individual memory chips rose 60 per cent in two months last year, from September to November.
Samsung has already announced it will delay its DDR4 end-of-life deadline, and the report says this happened because of a deal with a “key customer,” pushing DDR4 into servers while everyone else fights over scraps.
