Samsung has completed multiyear supply agreements with five major data-center customers, including Amazon and Meta, and is nearing deals with five more, according to the Seoul Economic Daily and the Korea Herald.
Once the pending agreements are finished, Samsung expects DRAM and NAND supply volumes under multiyear contracts to account for 60% to 70% of its planned medium- to long-term production capacity.
Samsung has not announced a price increase for HBM4 yet. Analysts project HBM4 costs of $31 to $32 per gigabyte for Nvidia GPUs, but that's a market forecast, not a Samsung price list.
What Samsung has done is build a contract structure that could let future price gains, HBM4 or otherwise, flow more directly to its earnings.
Its Q2 2026 memory business posted record results, and Samsung Electronics credited server-focused allocation amid tight capacity and industrywide price increases.
HBM4 was already scaling during the quarter, with Samsung expecting sales to more than triple quarter-over-quarter in Q3.
Why memory customers are accepting years-long lock-in commitments
AI infrastructure spending is pulling on HBM, conventional server DRAM, and NAND all at once, while new fab capacity takes years and billions of dollars to build. That mismatch shifts negotiating power toward suppliers, according to The Investor.
An industry official told The Investor that customers now weigh guaranteed supply as heavily as price, since AI memory products like HBM have grown more technically complex to qualify and source.
All three major memory makers are moving in the same direction. Micron has disclosed 16 strategic agreements backed by $22 billion in cash deposits and related financial commitments, SK hynix has completed negotiations with roughly 10 customers, and Taiwan's Nanya Technology says such contracts now cover about half its capacity, Korea Herald reported.
This is an industry-wide shift, not a Samsung-only maneuver. The three suppliers diverge in how they've negotiated the terms inside those deals.
Inside Samsung's contract structure: what's confirmed versus reported
Bank of America's analysis, as described by Seoul Economic Daily, characterizes Samsung's long-term agreements as capping quarterly price reductions at 5% while placing effectively no ceiling on increases. That's a third-party read on the structure, not published contract language.
Samsung executive Kim Jae-joon did confirm one piece of it directly. He said the company sets floor prices on general-purpose products specifically to hedge future investment risk, according to remarks reported by Seoul Economic Daily.
Samsung has also included substantial advance payments in its agreements and says it has already received about one-quarter of the total advance payments required under those contracts. The company says the mechanism is intended to strengthen customers' commitment to the multiyear agreements.
JPMorgan's July analysis, cited by Korea Herald, found that newer industry-wide long-term agreements broadly include preset volumes, pricing formulas, prepayments or deposits, collateral, and take-or-pay provisions in some cases.
Under take-or-pay terms, customers pay for committed volumes even if they ultimately order less. JPMorgan's analysis covers the shape of these deals generally; it doesn't say every agreement carries every provision, or that the terms are guaranteed to hold once demand turns down.
Samsung plans to keep roughly 30% to 40% of its planned capacity outside these agreements, retaining flexibility as market conditions change.
If Bank of America's characterization of the pricing structure holds up once volume actually flows, that uncommitted capacity plus a floor-protected, uncapped contract book could give Samsung more exposure to future price increases.
Samsung HBM4 chip price increase: what is projected versus what has happened
Samsung's DRAM average selling prices rose in the mid-40% range quarter-over-quarter in Q2, and NAND prices rose in the high-60% range, outpacing SK hynix's roughly 30% and mid-50% gains, according to TrendForce, citing MTN.
Much of that pricing momentum came from conventional memory, although Samsung was already scaling HBM4 sales during the quarter and expects a substantially larger ramp in Q3.
The pattern shows up in ordinary components too. July's fixed price for PC DRAM, DDR4 8Gb, jumped 14.3% month-over-month to $24, a level unseen since 2016, while 128Gb MLC NAND crossed $30.05, according to TrendForce figures cited by Seoul Economic Daily.
Those increases reach broadly into servers, PCs, and consumer devices, though AI infrastructure buildout is one of the demand drivers cited for the broader shortage.
The bigger HBM4 ramp is still ahead. Samsung expects Q3 HBM4 sales to more than triple quarter-over-quarter and HBM4 to account for well over 60% of second-half HBM revenue.
Fubon Research, cited by MoneyToday in the TrendForce report, projects HBM4 costs for Nvidia GPUs could reach $31 to $32 per gigabyte, nearly double HBM3e's $17 to $18.
Costs for other GPU makers and custom AI chips could climb even higher, to $35 to $36 per gigabyte, the report says. Those are projections tied to the HBM4 ramp, not prices Samsung has confirmed charging today.
Samsung's near-term edge also rests on scale it already has: roughly 1.1 million wafers of general-purpose DRAM and NAND capacity per month, comparable to SK hynix and Micron's combined output, according to Seoul Economic Daily.
HBM4 is the lever still being pulled.
Testing the differentiation: Samsung's terms against SK hynix and Micron
Micron has taken a different approach. Its largest strategic customer agreements generally include both price ceilings and floors, while several agreements representing a smaller portion of SCA revenue use fixed prices or no price bands.
According to Micron's Q3 earnings call, the 16 signed agreements represent roughly 20% of its DRAM volume and one-third of its NAND volume over their terms.
Micron expects half or more of company revenue to fall under SCAs once all of its targeted agreements are completed.
That structure can cap some upside even as it protects the downside. Bank of America's characterization of Samsung's floor-only structure, by contrast, describes a deal that gives up nothing on the way up, though that read comes from the bank's analysis rather than Samsung's published terms.
SK hynix's position looks more complicated. It holds an estimated 50% to 60% share of HBM3e, the mainstream HBM product through the first half of 2026, yet posted weaker earnings growth than Samsung over that stretch, according to TrendForce.
Counterpoint Research, cited by The Investor, pointed to SK hynix's earlier HBM agreements as one factor; pricing locked in before the current rally may have limited its exposure to it.
SK hynix has pushed back on the suggestion that it's selling HBM3e cheaply but has declined to disclose specific contract terms.
The cost of this pricing power doesn't stay contained to Samsung's competitors. Customers outside long-term deals face higher open-market prices, and Samsung's own device business is also absorbing higher memory costs as capacity increasingly favors profitable server products, The Investor reported.
Samsung's structure looks more aggressive than Micron's capped approach and better-timed than SK hynix's earlier commitments, but the comparison rests on deal mechanics that none of the three companies has published in full.
What comes next
SK Securities analyst Han Dong-hee describes the industry's new contracts as a form of "mutual hostage-taking" that could raise the sector's earnings floor, according to Korea Herald.
An industry official cited in the same report is more cautious: long-term agreements are unlikely to eliminate the memory cycle altogether, the official said, only to soften it, and how well they hold up will depend on the next downturn.
Samsung's next results should show whether HBM4 sales actually more than triple as projected, whether contract coverage reaches the 60% to 70% range the company is targeting, and whether the pricing terms Bank of America described translate into the margin advantage analysts expect.
Until then, the Samsung HBM4 chip price increase remains a projection built on a real contract structure and an HBM4 ramp that is still underway.
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