As the price of RAM and basically every single component that goes into building video game consoles and PCs continues to rise, there is a faint, borderline imperceptible glimmer of light at the end of the AI datacenter-induced RAMageddon: SK Hynix, one of the three largest chip and DRAM manufacturers in the world, recently had to justify to its investors during its Q2 2026 earnings report why it only made $55 billion in revenue instead of its projected $58 billion. Aw, poor babies.
Yes, this is the state of things at the moment, as SK Hynix’s reported 79 trillion Korean won revenue (roughly $55 billion) in Q2 2026 somehow, according to Reuters, fell short of its investors’ projections. CNBC noted in its report that investors expected them to make somewhere around 84 trillion Korean won (which is just over $58 billion).
Funnily enough, SK Hynix partially laid the blame for this dip on… PC and smartphone sales. In its Q2 2026 investors report, SK Hynix stated that the PC and smartphone market is experiencing a “temporary adjustment in sales due to challenges in securing memory volumes.” The call is coming from inside the house.
However, the real story is the effect that this had on the three largest RAM manufacturers, which also include Samsung and Micron Technology. Since SK Hynix’s Q2 2026 earnings call on July 29, the company’s stock valuation has dipped by a whopping 17 percent. Coincidentally, Micron Technology’s stock price has since dipped by 11 percent, and Samsung’s has dropped by 10 percent.
Now, I’m certainly no financial journalist, but I can’t help but see a correlation here. Thankfully, you don’t have to take my best guess for it, as Yahoo Finance states that SK Hynix’s latest earnings report is directly to blame for dips across the entire semiconductor and RAM manufacturing market.
I don’t know about you, but that faint glimmer at the end of the aforementioned tunnel just got slightly brighter on my end. At this rate, maybe we’ll all finally be able to afford a Steam Machine at some point in 2030.