Goldman Sachs View: Storage Market Shows Structural Shift, NAND Partially Substituting DRAM for Cost Reduction Emerging as a Real Trend

BlockBeats News, July 16th, Citirni analyst Jukan quoted Goldman Sachs' monthly conference call memo on the memory sector. Customers showed strong resistance to the nearly 30% price increase in DRAM, leading to a slight downward revision of the third-quarter DRAM price growth expectations. Meanwhile, the outlook for NAND has become more optimistic—AI-related KV Cache offload demand continues to exceed expectations, coupled with the emerging trend of using NAND as a substitute for expensive DRAM, further supporting NAND demand. The analyst is positive about SK Hynix's second-quarter performance, with expected revenue of about 85 trillion Korean won and a gross margin as high as 63%. Relevant targets include SK Hynix, Micron, and SanDisk.

The analysis also revealed a structural change in the storage market. Previously, the explosive demand for HBM in AI servers drove up DRAM prices, but after the price surge reached 30%, customers began to resist further price hikes, leading to a temporary slowdown in the price increase rate. Meanwhile, NAND is taking on a new role in AI infrastructure—KV Cache is crucial in the inference scenario, and the practical trend of partially replacing expensive DRAM with cheaper NAND to reduce costs is emerging. This differentiation also means that internal capital rotation within the storage industry chain may continue, with investors needing to be more cautious about short-term profit expectations for DRAM-related targets, while the fundamental improvement on the NAND side may not have been fully priced in yet.