"It’s bad, and it’s getting worse right now."
SSDs will continue to rise, with the upward trend running through the entire year of 2026. According to TomsHardware, Cameron Crandell, SSD Business Manager at Kingston Data Centers, warns that the shortage of NAND Flash may worsen within 30 days, directly driving up SSD prices. He also predicts that memory and SSD prices will rise throughout 2026. Crandell, who has 29 years of experience in Kingston, said that the storage price increase this time is "unprecedented". He suggested that consumers with storage upgrade needs should take immediate action and not wait and see. The industry points out that NAND Flash, which accounts for 90% of the material cost of traditional SSDs, has price fluctuations as the core influencing factor of terminal prices.
Since the beginning of this year, NAND Flash has skyrocketed, and cost pressure has been transmitted to the end market. Enterprise grade SSDs have entered a stage where both quantity and price have risen. The latest survey by global market research firm TrendForce Consulting shows that the overall atmosphere of the storage market in the fourth quarter of 2024 has shifted from "recovery" to "material grabbing". The core reason is that after experiencing previous market cycle fluctuations, NAND Flash suppliers generally adopt a cautious strategy for capacity expansion, resulting in a much lower growth rate of enterprise SSD capacity than the market demand growth rate.
The outbreak of the AI industry is the key driving force behind the supply-demand imbalance in the storage market. For core buyers such as cloud service providers (CSPs), an active inventory reserve plan has been launched recently to avoid delays in the costly AI server construction schedule due to SSD shortages. In this supply-demand pattern, Jibang Consulting predicts that the average contract price of enterprise SSDs in the fourth quarter will achieve a quarterly increase of over 25%, and the overall revenue of related industries is expected to reach a historical high. It is worth noting that the price surge in the storage market is not limited to the SSD field. According to media reports, driven indirectly by the demand for AI, the price of traditional HDD (mechanical hard disk) has also increased. Industry insiders point out that the current storage shortage has surpassed the scope of a single NAND Flash chip and evolved into a comprehensive impact on all available storage devices in the market. The entire storage industry is facing a global supply-demand imbalance challenge.
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