Samsung has unveiled a new generation of 3D memory and storage technology at the Future of Memory and Storage show in Santa Clara, showcasing advances aimed largely at data centres and AI accelerators rather than everyday consumer devices. Although the innovations are technically impressive, the announcement highlights a growing frustration among consumers: with memory manufacturing increasingly geared towards AI infrastructure, ordinary buyers are unlikely to see the benefits in the form of cheaper or faster components for their own PCs, especially as memory prices remain inflated by surging AI-driven demand.

Among the new technologies, Samsung introduced zHBM, a concept memory architecture that stacks high-bandwidth memory directly above AI accelerators, boosting performance up to eightfold and offering more than ten times the density of current HBM5 chips while tripling energy efficiency. It also revealed V10 BV-NAND storage, which stacks over 400 layers of memory cells for a roughly 58% density increase over the previous generation, alongside zNAND-O for edge AI applications and LPDDR5X-PIM, the first LPDDR memory to integrate processing-in-memory technology. Samsung and SK Hynix together dominate global memory production, and both are struggling to meet AI-driven demand, a shortfall that continues to push up prices across consumer electronics including consoles, smartphones and laptops.