“These capacities have to be brought online years ago. You have to build these fabs and the energy for this, and the largest hyperscaler models from the largest names, which I won’t mention but you know who they are, are all looking to make sure they have the ability to continue their infrastructure. And it has an impact across the entire ecosystem,” Ryan McCurdy, Lenovo’s senior vice president and president of North America, told CRN.
While Lenovo saw record quarterly revenue, a healthy rise in infrastructure sales and continued dominance the PC category during its most recent quarter, the company is turning its full attention to mitigating the memory shortages it sees on the horizon, Lenovo executive Ryan McCurdy told CRN.
“We like to think that we’re going to be the best at navigating this,” said McCurdy, Lenovo’s senior vice president and president of North America. “But to do that, you have to be proactive, planning with your partners, with your customers. And this is something we’re spending a disproportionate amount of time on, and I think it’s going to dominate the narrative in the quarters to come.”
McCurdy said the market for DRAM and NAND memory are facing the largest supply-demand gap in the last decade, which is likely to lead to a systemic shortage coming across the industry, driven by the large hyperscalers.
“It has a downstream effect on every device that uses hard drives and memory, and there’s CPU elements to it, and it’s all interconnected, and it’s very exciting as a supply chain undergrad, but it’s also the dominant feature today, and it’s all part of that larger narrative,” he said.
McCurdy (pictured) said the industry is bracing for memory shortages from the data center to the smartphone, which could see DRAM and NAND prices double as device makers vie for time and space in a limited number of chip fabrication plants.
“These capacities have to be brought online years ago,” he said. “You have to build these fabs and the energy for this, and the largest hyperscalers’ models from the largest names, which I won’t mention but you know who they are, are all looking to make sure they have the ability to continue their infrastructure. And it has an impact across the entire ecosystem.”
McCurdy said Lenovo has built a dynamic supply chain that has demonstrated its ability to weather sudden shifts and unknowns, such as trade policy moves around tariffs and global geopolitics.
“You’ve seen us do this over the last few years. We’re winning. We have the supply chain. We have the relationships,” he said. “Let’s talk, let’s plan. Let’s make sure we navigate this next season.”
Lenovo’s newest channel chief, Wade McFarland, took over 13 weeks ago. He said he has spent much of his time recently talking with distributors and leading partners about how Lenovo plans to mitigate the shortage the company sees on the horizon.
“I think we are very well positioned with our partners, but again, I just go back to the way that we collaborate and the way that we’re out on our front foot having these conversations before we get to those events, which I think we’ll start to really probably see materialize at the beginning of the year,” McFarland said. “So I think that’s what’s helpful, is just being on our front foot and being out there with our partners and navigating through these uncertain times that are heading our way.”
Lenovo last week reported record revenue of $20.4 billion, up 15 percent year over year for its second quarter in fiscal year 2025/26. Additionally, the company, which is publicly traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, reported net income growth of 25 percent year over year to $512 million.
The largest portion of Lenovo’s sales, some $15.1 billion, came from its Intelligent Devices Group, which makes PCs, phones, tablets and peripheral devices. That unit grew revenue 12 percent, helped along by demand for AI PCs, which now account for 33 percent of all PC shipments, the company said.
The company’s infrastructure business notched $4.1 billion in sales, up 24 percent year on year as demand for the company’s Neptune line of direct-to-chip liquid-cooled servers saw strong demand from cloud service providers, enterprise and the SMB.
