Is High Bandwidth Memory on the cusp of commoditisation?

Investors have been actively debating where High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) pricing could be heading in 2026. On the back of extensive industry meetings and expert calls, we believe a commoditisation of HBM is unlikely to start in 2026. We support our analysis with a Street-new proprietary bottom-up model per HBM vendor, client and product (volumes+ASPs). We conclude that industry HBM ASPs will grow 20%/11% in ’25/’26, likely higher than investor expectations stemming from concerns around prolonging pricing negotiations.

We note that, while customisation "sounds" like the opposite of commoditisation and may be superficially seen as good news for HBM vendors, it may in fact contribute to reduce differentiation between them. In addition, this may raise additional challenges such as optimisation for specific DRAM dies and overall project ownership over system performance