Memory prices continue to rise due to shortages, and now, packaging & testing companies have announced a price hike of up to 30%.
Not Just DRAM Suppliers, Memory Packaging & Testing Companies Have Also Announced A 30% Price Hike With Even More Bumps Expected Throughout 2026
As price hikes continue to grip the memory segment, the market continues to remain tight from a supply perspective, and everyone is currently facing the brunt of it. As per the most recent report coming out of UDN, memory packaging and testing companies such as Powertech, Walton, and ChipMOS are all set to further raise prices by up to 30%.
All three companies, Powertech, Walton, and ChipMOS, are responsible for memory packaging and testing. While Samsung, Hynix, and Micron are responsible for producing the DRAM used in memory products such as DDR4, DDR5, and HBM, it's those three we mentioned above that supply the respective memory modules for testing and validation. These three vendors also package the DRAM modules before sending them out to customers.
Powertech is a key packaging and testing partner of Micron, while Walton belongs to the Walsin Lihwa Group and mainly handles orders from Winbond, also within the same group. With strong shipments of memory chips from Micron and Winbond, demand for back-end packaging and testing has surged, leading to a boom for Powertech and Walton in the Year of the Horse. Additionally, Formosa Plastics, which handles orders from Nanya Technology, also benefits.
Taking Powertech as an example, in recent years, as Micron has adjusted its product and capacity configuration, some of its internal packaging and testing capacity has been released, including high-end memory products such as Mobile Graphics and DDR5. Powertech has taken on related orders, increasing the proportion of high-end products and maintaining a high capacity utilization rate.
But due to a massive influx of orders, mainly coming from AI customers, these packaging and testing companies have now bumped up their costs by 30%, and there's a second wave of price hikes being planned already which means that memory prices are aiming for the high skies throughout 2026, and given our recent interview with Micron, it looks like things aren't going to get better anytime soon.
Currently, the three major memory packaging and testing companies, Powertech, ChipMOS, & Walton, are based in Taiwan with their customers primarily being major international memory manufacturers. It's not just these three, Chinese-based, East China, which is responsible for packaging and testing niche memory, has also seen "above-normal" demand, and their utilization rate has increased significantly.
As per every memory vendor right now, the industry is going through a super-cycle, which is mainly due to the unprecedented demand from the AI segment. This cycle is expected to last several years (up to 2028). For now, we can only expect memory prices to continue to increase, not only for data centers but also for regular consumers. The memory crisis has already disrupted the PC segment, with component prices seeing major hikes across the board, even items that aren't associated with memory but use key components, and materials that can be used by the data center segment, such as Aluminum, Copper, etc.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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