80% of Samsung's Memory Capacity for Next Year Already Locked in by Long-Term Agreements as Tech Giants Scramble for Remaining Share
nashnova research
Samsung Electronics has locked roughly 80% of next year's memory-chip capacity through long-term agreements with Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft on contracts spanning five-plus years; the AI arms race has shifted from buying compute to hoarding components, leaving latecomers to fight over the remaining 20%.
80% locked — how much Samsung memory is left for everyone else?
Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft have signed five-year-plus supply agreements with Samsung, securing about 80% of next year's memory output.
Samsung told its Q2 earnings call: "Nearly all major customers are requesting long-term agreements," adding it "cannot respond to all demand."
This means → companies without a contract are competing for roughly 20% of capacity. Chip supply is no longer about who pays the most — it is about who signs first.
Is Samsung alone — or is the whole memory industry locking up?
SK Hynix has completed long-term agreements with its key customers. Micron's strategic-customer contracts rose from 16 in Q2 to 26 in Q3.
SanDisk, a NAND flash manufacturer — chips used for data storage — has signed long-term deals with eight customers, including several major tech firms.
In plain terms = all three memory giants are being locked up at the same time. This is not one company's supply squeeze — it is the entire AI supply chain stockpiling.
Where else has the long-term-contract wave spread?
Samsung Electro-Mechanics is about to sign a ₩700 billion MLCC deal — multilayer ceramic capacitors, a basic component inside phones and servers — with a counterparty. The company's cumulative orders this year are expected to reach ₩4.6 trillion.
LG Innotek is in long-term talks over FC-BGA substrates — the layer connecting a chip to a circuit board.
Power and cooling are in the mix too: LS Cable signed a five-year busway deal with Meta and Google; LG Electronics signed a ₩5 trillion chiller contract with US AI-infrastructure firm Air.
This reflects a bottleneck that now runs far beyond chips — capacitors, substrates, transformers, cooling systems — the entire supply chain is being pre-committed.
How strong is the suppliers' hand?
Five years has become the standard base term, with annual rolling one-year extensions on top.
Upfront payments of 20% to 25% are now standard. Suppliers sometimes channel these payments directly into wafer-fab expansion.
Even if customers fail to take delivery, they must still pay — This means → buyers bear the full risk of demand swings, and pricing power has shifted decisively toward suppliers.
What happens to these contracts if AI demand reverses?
Seoul National University professor Choi Woo-young warns: if the memory market slumps and customers push to renegotiate, "suppliers will have no choice but to relax existing terms."
In the more extreme scenario, customers may simply breach and pay penalties — leaving component makers that expanded aggressively on the back of these contracts exposed to severe overcapacity.
Put simply = long-term agreements stabilize the supply chain, but they also tie suppliers' fate tightly to sustained AI demand. How long the AI boom lasts is how long this model holds.
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