There is a ritual to flagship leak season. Someone in Seoul posts the memory configurations, everyone scans for the number that went up, and the comments fill with complaints about whichever tier stayed flat. This year the ritual broke, because nothing went up at all.
South Korean leaker Lanzuk has published what are claimed to be the full RAM and storage configurations for the Samsung Galaxy S27 lineup. Every model, from the base phone to the Ultra, carries the same amounts as its Galaxy S26 equivalent. One capacity option has quietly disappeared. And the only genuine improvement is a change most buyers will never notice on a spec sheet.
The configurations, line by line
Here is what the leak claims, next to what Samsung sells today.
| Model | Galaxy S27 (leaked) | Galaxy S26 (current) |
|---|---|---|
| Base model | 12GB + 256GB or 512GB | 12GB + 128GB, 256GB or 512GB |
| Plus | 12GB + 256GB or 512GB | 12GB + 256GB or 512GB |
| Pro (new tier) | 12GB + 256GB, 512GB or 1TB | No equivalent |
| Ultra | 12GB + 256GB or 512GB, 16GB + 1TB | 12GB + 256GB or 512GB, 16GB + 1TB |
Two things stand out. The first is the vanishing 128GB tier on the base model, which sounds like a downgrade and is arguably the opposite. Nobody should buy a 128GB flagship in 2026, and removing it means the entry price now buys a usable phone. It also, conveniently for Samsung, raises the cheapest configuration in the lineup.
The second is the new Pro model, and it is the odd one out. The S27 Pro is understood to be a more compact take on the Ultra, and it tops out at 12GB of RAM even in its 1TB configuration. The Ultra pairs 1TB with 16GB. Someone buying the most expensive Pro therefore pays flagship money for less memory than the equivalent Ultra buyer, which is a strange place to draw a product line given that on device AI is the feature every manufacturer is currently selling hardest.
Why none of this is Samsung being cheap
Samsung makes memory. It is one of the three companies that make almost all of the world’s DRAM. You would expect that to insulate it from a memory shortage, and it does not, because the shortage is not about manufacturing capacity. It is about where that capacity is pointed.
IDC’s estimate is that AI data centers will consume roughly 70 percent of global memory output in 2026, against 20 to 30 percent in 2022. Server memory sells at margins that phone memory cannot approach, so every wafer redirected to a data center is a wafer that is not becoming a phone component. Samsung’s memory division and Samsung’s phone division are, in effect, competing customers, and the memory division is winning.
The price consequences have been severe. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose roughly 90 to 95 percent quarter over quarter through the first quarter of 2026, overshooting even pessimistic forecasts made in January. SK Hynix’s chief executive has described 2027 as potentially the worst year in the industry’s history from a supply perspective. New fabrication capacity is not expected to reach meaningful volume before late 2027, with 2028 emerging as the realistic base case for normalization.
Everyone is making the same decision
The useful thing about this leak is that it is not an isolated data point. Every major manufacturer has now responded to the same squeeze, and the responses fall into three categories.
| Response | Who did it | What the buyer feels |
|---|---|---|
| Freeze the specs, hold the price | Samsung, per this leak | A flagship that is not better than last year’s in the ways you can measure |
| Hold the specs, raise the price | Apple | The same phone, more money, most of it at the high capacity end |
| Cut elsewhere to protect the memory budget | Poco, and much of the mid range | An older chipset, or a downgraded component you did not expect |
Apple’s version of this played out in public earlier this month, when every iPhone rose by $100 and the 1TB models went up $300. The shape of that increase, weighted heavily toward the largest capacities, is a memory cost pass through wearing a price list as a disguise.
The mid range answer has been blunter still. Poco did something almost unheard of and said the quiet part out loud, explaining that the F9 Ultra reused the previous generation’s chipset specifically because of RAM prices. A manufacturer publicly blaming component costs for a spec decision is not normal. It happens when the alternative explanation is worse.
Against that backdrop, holding 12GB flat looks less like stagnation and more like the least painful available option. Samsung is choosing to disappoint spec sheet readers rather than surprise people at checkout.
The upgrade that is actually in here
Lost in the disappointment is the one real generational change. The same leak indicates that the S27 Pro and S27 Ultra will use LPDDR6 RAM and UFS 5.1 storage, most likely restricted to the higher capacity tiers. The Galaxy S26 Ultra shipped with LPDDR5X and UFS 4.0.
That is not a cosmetic difference. LPDDR6 raises bandwidth substantially over LPDDR5X while improving efficiency per bit transferred, and the bandwidth part matters more every year, because on device AI models are bandwidth bound rather than capacity bound. Running a language model locally means streaming the entire model through the memory bus for every token generated. How fast that bus moves determines how fast the assistant responds. UFS 5.1 similarly roughly doubles the sequential throughput of UFS 4.0, which shows up in app cold starts and in loading large models off storage in the first place.
| Component | Galaxy S26 Ultra | Galaxy S27 Pro and Ultra (tipped) |
|---|---|---|
| RAM type | LPDDR5X | LPDDR6, likely top tiers only |
| Storage type | UFS 4.0 | UFS 5.1, likely top tiers only |
| RAM amount | 12GB, or 16GB on 1TB | Unchanged |
| What improves | Baseline | Memory bandwidth and storage throughput, not headroom |
So the honest summary of the S27 memory story is that it gets faster without getting bigger. For most real world use that is the better half of the trade, since 12GB is genuinely sufficient for multitasking on current Android. It only becomes a problem if the AI features Samsung keeps adding need to keep larger models resident in memory, and that is precisely the direction those features are heading.
What this means if you are buying
The practical advice has inverted from what it was three years ago. Storage used to be the thing you could compromise on, because you could always offload photos to the cloud. Memory was rarely worth paying for, because Android managed 8GB fine.
Now the reverse holds. RAM is the component you cannot add, upgrade or work around later, and it is the component every new software feature is hungry for. Storage is still expensive but at least the shortfall has workarounds.
How reliable is this?
Lanzuk has a solid track record on Samsung component details, and configuration leaks of this kind usually come from supply chain ordering rather than guesswork, which makes them more dependable than design or feature rumors. The specifics are still months from confirmation, though, and Samsung has adjusted memory plans late in development before. The LPDDR6 and UFS 5.1 claims carry the most uncertainty, particularly the question of which tiers get them.
The Galaxy S27 series is expected to follow Samsung’s usual pattern of a first quarter announcement. Nothing here is official until it is.
Frequently asked questions
How much RAM will the Galaxy S27 have?
Twelve gigabytes across the S27, S27 Plus and S27 Pro according to the leak, with 16GB reserved for the 1TB Galaxy S27 Ultra. That matches the Galaxy S26 lineup exactly.
Is Samsung removing the 128GB Galaxy S27?
The leak says yes. The base Galaxy S26 was available in 128GB, and the S27 reportedly starts at 256GB. That raises the entry price but eliminates a storage tier most buyers should have avoided anyway.
What is the Galaxy S27 Pro?
A new model in the lineup, understood to be a more compact alternative to the Ultra. It is tipped to offer 256GB, 512GB and 1TB of storage, all with 12GB of RAM, so its highest configuration has less memory than the top Ultra.
Why is the RAM not increasing?
The global memory shortage. AI data centers are absorbing an estimated 70 percent of world memory output, DRAM contract prices have risen sharply through 2026, and adding memory to a phone now costs far more than it did a generation ago. Samsung appears to be holding capacity flat to limit price increases.
Will the Galaxy S27 be faster than the S26 despite the same RAM?
Probably, yes. The Pro and Ultra are tipped to move from LPDDR5X to LPDDR6 and from UFS 4.0 to UFS 5.1, which improves memory bandwidth and storage throughput considerably even with identical capacities. The gains are in speed rather than headroom.
When does the memory shortage end?
Not soon. New fabrication capacity is not expected to arrive in meaningful volume before late 2027, and 2028 is widely treated as the realistic point of normalization. Some industry figures have warned the imbalance could persist beyond that.
The bottom line
A flagship generation that adds no memory is not the story here. The story is that the largest memory manufacturer on earth cannot spec its own flagship phone the way it wants to, because its most profitable customers are data centers and phone buyers cannot outbid them.
Samsung is making the defensible choice. Flat capacity with faster memory technology, and a price that has some chance of staying reasonable, beats a spec bump nobody can afford. It is simply the first time in years that the Galaxy S lineup’s memory story has been about constraint rather than ambition, and it will not be the last. The supply picture gets worse before it gets better.
Sources and further reading
- TechRadar: The Galaxy S27 series could be another victim of the RAM crisis
- GSMArena: Galaxy S27, S27+, S27 Pro and S27 Ultra RAM and storage configurations leak
- SamMobile: Galaxy S27 may use UFS 5.1
- IDC: Global memory shortage crisis and its impact on smartphones and PCs
- Background: the 2025 to present global memory supply shortage
