Nomura Securities said memory demand will grow faster than supply at least through 2028 and kept buy ratings on Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, naming both as top picks in a global memory report published Tuesday.
The call runs against a rough tape. Investors have spent the past week marking chip stocks down over slower revenue growth at AI companies and the financing strain on data center operators.
The argument against reading earnings as demand
Nomura’s reasoning is that the profits of individual AI companies are a poor proxy for how many chips get bought. It also treated the risk of trouble at a single operator as limited, since data centers and equipment can be taken over and run by someone else if one provider stumbles.
Capacity is the load-bearing number in the note. New global data center capacity tracked by the brokerage comes to 22.3 GW this year and 31.5 GW next year. On that trajectory, supply stays behind demand and pricing keeps favouring the memory sellers.
Nomura added a balance sheet observation: combined net cash across nine chipmakers, Samsung and SK hynix included, should climb from $282B in the second quarter to roughly $2T by the end of 2028, leaving suppliers stronger than the customers they sell to.
What would break it
The analysts set price targets of KRW 670,000 for Samsung and KRW 4.7M for SK hynix, then attached a condition. If data center plans keep being cut, or already-funded builds slip, the demand picture has to be rebuilt from scratch.
The note lands days before earnings at both companies, where forward pricing, not past shipments, will decide whether the market takes the argument.
