AI data centres are swallowing 70% of all high-end DRAM, while a bitter internal feud at Nexperia leaves critical MOSFETs and logic ICs with no guaranteed authenticity. For Indian procurement teams, the old rulebook just got torn up.
In April 2026, procurement heads across India’s automotive, industrial and server-building sectors are staring at numbers that rewrite the cost side of every bill of materials.
ASC Global, a distributor of electronic components, released its Q2 2026 Market Report.
The memory supercycle
Memory contract prices have jumped 63% for DRAM and 75% for NAND Flash in a single quarter, while Texas Instruments analog power switches have shot up 85% and Intel CPUs by 30%. These aren’t forecasts; they’re the price table straight out of the report.
What backs those increases into a structural shift rather than a temporary squeeze is the consumption split the report lays bare: AI data centres are now taking 70% of all high-end DRAM, leaving industrial and consumer applications with just 30%.
The fabrication lines that once churned out general-purpose memory have been physically retooled for HBM and enterprise SSDs, and that capacity isn’t coming back.
But the most urgent visual in the report isn’t about memory at all. It’s a component-level table that maps the Nexperia crisis onto exact part families. LFPAK/CCPAK MOSFETs, ideal diodes, and SiC/GaN devices are marked ‘Critical’ – meaning a supply interruption hits the production line immediately.
Small-signal discretes like BAV99 and PMBT3904, plus entire 74HC and LVC logic families, sit at ‘very high’ difficulty to replace because they’re too deeply designed-in to swap without requalification.
The Nexperia crisis
In March 2026, Nexperia’s Dutch headquarters disabled IT access for its China-based staff, effectively severing operational ties.
The Dutch parent Nexperia B.V. now warns that it cannot verify the authenticity or AEC-Q101 automotive-grade status of any component produced in China using locally sourced wafers from date code 2542 onwards.
The countermove, a $300 million fast-tracked expansion in Malaysia with a target of shifting 90% of production out of China by mid-2026, is captured, but the timeline leaves a gap where untrusted parts could still enter supply chains.
For Indian buyers, that means country-of-origin checks and date-code audits are no longer optional; they’re the only defence against counterfeits landing on assembled boards.
The report’s advice is blunt: defer non-urgent buys, requote every two weeks, and trace every Nexperia part number back to its source before the line runs.
