Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said memory prices have risen five- to sevenfold and that conditions will get worse, in remarks reported on September 15 by Seoul Economic Daily. He called memory the main bottleneck in AI infrastructure and said projects are being delayed because companies cannot secure enough of it.

The figure is not usable as data. Intel published no transcript, the remarks reach us through secondary reporting, and the multiple carries no product, no base date and no price type. TrendForce places the comments at Splunk's .conf26 broadcast on September 16, a day later than the Korean account, so even the venue is unsettled.

Two other numbers from the same remarks are firmer and more useful. Tan said Intel can meet only about 50% of customer demand for processors, and that advanced packaging substrates come from four suppliers, two Japanese and two Taiwanese, whom Intel has to prepay to get attention. That is a large buyer treating prepayment as normal for a scarce input, the same behaviour now visible in memory long-term agreements.

What gives the remarks weight is the speaker's position. Suppliers describing shortage have an interest in the narrative; a buyer whose costs rise has the opposite one, and is describing delayed projects rather than disputed forecasts. None of it adds supply, and the squeeze he attributes to HBM reallocation is the same mechanism that leaves less capacity for general-purpose memory into 2027.