VIP Deep Dive: Is the Memory Supercycle Over? — The Truth About AI Demand Behind Samsung's Warning

The market selloff triggered by Samsung's Q2 profit warning on July 29, 2026 is the first real 'stress test' of the storage sector in the AI era. SK Hynix plunged 13% in a single day, Samsung fell 9%, and Kospi shed a combined market cap of about $40 billion in a single session.

This article develops along three dimensions: first, whether the historical pattern of memory cycles over the past 30 years still holds; second, whether 'AI server memory order weakness' is a channel inventory adjustment or an early signal of real AI demand saturation; and third, the divergence trend between HBM4 and DDR5, and the potential Q3-Q4 recovery path for the memory industry.

In this public preview, we first establish a basic judgment framework. The full analysis will cover the supply-side game among the three leading vendors (Hynix, Samsung, Micron), the actual pull-in cadence of the hyperscale customers (CSPs), and the marginal impact on global pricing power after CXMT's 2027 listing.