China's YMTC expects the NAND shortage to persist another three years, according to The Wire China

A prolonged-shortage call from a domestic producer fits the established pattern of the memory cycle: NAND and DRAM trade as commodities with multi-year waves in which underinvestment after a downturn, capacity discipline among the majors, and rising demand from AI and storage produce extended pricing upswings, and public shortage forecasts from suppliers have historically marked the middle rather than the end of such phases. The signal worth reading is that this comes from YMTC, a state-backed Chinese manufacturer with its own interest in scarcity framing, both to justify expansion and to position for wafer pricing, so producer commentary of this kind has tended to err on the hawkish side relative to the eventual turn. The mechanism that matters for equities is contract and spot pricing for NAND, which flows through to margins across the memory peer set, and, on the other side, to input costs for OEMs, handset and server makers. The usual sequence in past cycles is that shortage talk is confirmed or falsified by contract price prints, spot-versus-contract spreads, and vendor inventory days before it shows up in guidance. The follow-ons are capacity announcements from the large Korean and Japanese players and whether downstream customers report build-up of buffer stocks, since double-ordering has historically been the tell that a shortage phase is late rather than early. As a single-company view attributed to a third-party report, the signal is directional rather than authoritative.