Did Nvidia suggest they alone would buy all the memory?
On today’s conference call, NVIDIA stated that it expects the standalone Vera CPU market to reach $20 billion in FY2027.
The unit price of Grace CPU is estimated at around $3,000–$5,000. Since Vera is the successor to Grace and is optimised for AI agentic workloads, we expect Vera to carry a higher ASP of roughly $5,000–$8,000 per unit.
Assuming a Vera CPU ASP of $8,000, a $20 billion market would imply 2.5 million CPUs.
It remains unclear whether standalone Vera CPU sales will include the same SoCAMM capacity as NVL72. However, assuming the same capacity is applied, each Vera CPU would have 8 SoCAMM slots. Assuming 192GB per module, SoCAMM capacity per Vera CPU would be 1,536GB.
Therefore, FY2027 SoCAMM demand for Vera CPU would be:
2.5 million CPUs × 1,536GB = 3.84 billion GB, or 30.72 billion Gb.
CY2026, which broadly overlaps with NVIDIA’s FY2027, SoCAMM supply from the three major DRAM makers is estimated at 30 billion Gb. Therefore, combined SoCAMM demand from NVIDIA’s standalone Vera CPU sales and VR NVL72 sales already appears likely to exceed the annual (global)supply capacity of 30 billion Gb.
Assuming CY2027 VR NVL72 shipments of 100,000 servers, we estimated the SoCAMM TAM at 44 billion Gb based on 192GB modules. If additional SoCAMM demand from standalone Vera CPU sales is added, the CY2027 SoCAMM TAM could exceed 80 billion Gb.
An annual 80 billion Gb of LPDDR5 would be nearly equivalent to the annual LPDDR5 TAM used for smartphones.
The shortage of LPDDR5 — and of DRAM overall — is likely to intensify further over time.