The world's two biggest memory chip makers have almost no spare stock left, which is great for their profits but bad for anyone buying phones, laptops, or servers next year.

• Samsung and SK Hynix are down to under 10 days of memory inventory, and next year they may simply have nothing left to sell.
• The cause is the AI building boom: cloud giants are set to spend $1.3 trillion on AI infrastructure next year, up 60%.
• Memory is eating a bigger share of that spending every year, jumping from a small slice to more than half.
• The squeeze goes beyond the fancy AI chips — regular server memory and enterprise storage drives are tight too.
• New HBM4 chips make it worse because they use three times the factory capacity of standard memory, crowding out ordinary DRAM.

Outlook: Demand is expected to outrun supply by more than 10 percentage points next year, so memory prices are likely to keep climbing.