Multiple Sectors See Frequent Tech Developments: Optimistic Storage Market, Growing PC Shipments, and Upgraded AI Hardware
Recently, the global technology sector has been thriving across multiple fronts, with key developments emerging in storage, PC, and AI hardware segments. Enterprises have been taking active actions, and the market prospects have attracted significant attention.
In the storage market, leading enterprises hold a positive outlook for the future. Kwon Oh-hyun, CEO of SK Hynix, stated that he is optimistic about the memory semiconductor market next year. The company has met the performance and speed standards for HBM4 required by customers, ensuring mass production capacity. It completed the development of HBM4 and established a mass production system in September, and is currently providing final sample testing for NVIDIA. He also predicted that the demand for HBM will surge next year, and the concentration of enterprise production capacity on HBM may lead to a shortage in DRAM supply and a rise in prices. Meanwhile, Micron has launched a 192GB SOCAMM2 customer sample, which adopts 1γ process technology. Its energy efficiency has been improved by over 20%, and its capacity is 50% higher than that of the first LPDRAM SOCAMM. This product can significantly reduce the first token time of real-time inference workloads, providing support for low-power memory applications in AI data centers. In addition, due to the explosive demand for storage in AI facilities, some enterprises have signed 2-3 year long-term DRAM supply contracts with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. These two major manufacturers control over 70% of the general DRAM market, and their production focus is shifting towards HBM, resulting in a decline in general DRAM production capacity. However, the shortage and price increase of DRAM, as well as the supply gap of CPUs, have also brought pressure to board manufacturers. Second and third-tier manufacturers are cautious about shipments in the fourth quarter, while first-tier manufacturers expect that shipments may decline in the fourth quarter.
The PC market has shown a brilliant performance. In September, PC shipments in Japan reached 1.445 million units, surging by 86.4% year-on-year, hitting a new high in nearly 5 years and achieving 15 consecutive months of growth. Among them, laptop shipments reached 1.307 million units, an increase of 93.3% year-on-year, accounting for over 80%. In the third quarter of 2025, the total global PC shipments amounted to 72 million units, with a year-on-year growth of 6.8%. Leading manufacturers such as Lenovo and HP have all achieved growth. The demand for equipment upgrades brought about by the end of Windows 10 support is the main driving force.
New progress has also been made in the AI hardware field. Intel’s Nova Lake processor has been confirmed to be equipped with the 6th generation NPU, featuring enhanced AI performance. It is expected to be released at the end of next year and will adopt the 18A process. Alibaba Tongyi Qwen3-VL has added two dense model sizes, 2B and 32B. The 32B model performs excellently in multiple aspects, while the 2B model can run on extreme edge devices, facilitating deployment by developers.