Goldman Sachs: NAND Replacing DRAM Becomes a Trend, DRAM Price Expectations for Q3 Downgraded

On July 16, Citirni analyst Jukan cited Goldman Sachs' analysis, stating that clients have shown strong resistance to nearly 30% increases in DRAM prices, leading to a slight downgrade in growth expectations for DRAM prices in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the outlook for NAND remains optimistic, with AI-related KV Cache offloading demand consistently exceeding expectations, resulting in a trend of using NAND to replace expensive DRAM, further supporting NAND demand. Analysts hold a positive view on SK Hynix's second-quarter performance, expecting revenue of approximately 85 trillion won and a gross margin of up to 63%. The storage market is showing structural changes; the demand for HBM from AI servers had previously driven DRAM prices to soar, but as the increase approached 30%, clients began resisting price hikes, causing the rate of increase to slow down. NAND is playing a new role in AI infrastructure, with a trend emerging of partially replacing expensive DRAM to reduce costs. This differentiation suggests that the rotation of funds within the storage industry chain may continue, and investors should be cautious about short-term profit expectations for DRAM-related assets, while the fundamentals for NAND may not have been fully priced in yet.