The price doubles in four months. How much longer will the memory card prices continue to rise?

Title: Prices Doubling in Four Months, How Much Longer Will Memory Card Prices Rise?

Author: Rhythm BlockBeats

Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

Since the beginning of this year, NAND flash prices have entered a new rapid upward cycle, with retail prices of consumer storage products leading the way. In October 2025, a SanDisk Extreme 128GB microSD card was selling for $17 on Amazon. In February of the same year, the same card was nearly $40. In less than four months, it increased by 130%.

First, it’s necessary to clarify the difference between memory modules (RAM) and memory cards, as they are not the same type of product. Memory modules (RAM) are temporary storage inside computers, used for data read/write during program operation, and data disappears when power is off. Memory cards (such as microSD cards) are external expansion storage used for long-term preservation of photos, videos, and other files; data is retained even when power is off. The price increase discussed in this article pertains to the latter—memory cards and the NAND flash chips behind them.

The continuous rise in memory card prices is driven by systemic re-pricing in the entire NAND flash market, with the starting point being AI data centers competing for the same wafer batches.

Contract prices have risen 50%, but by the time they reach you, they’ve increased 130%

Let’s first explain what is happening.

Global NAND flash contract prices have been rising rapidly since late last year. According to a report released by market research firm TrendForce in February, overall NAND contract prices are expected to increase by approximately 55–60% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to Q4 2025, with enterprise SSDs (Solid State Drives) seeing a rise of 53–58%, setting a quarterly record. TrendForce also predicts that overall NAND contract prices will rise another 70–75% in the second quarter.

These figures are the unit prices in bulk contracts signed between large clients and manufacturers, not directly equivalent to retail prices on e-commerce platforms. However, retail prices for consumers are rising even faster. The rightmost bar in Figure 1, representing a 130% increase, reflects the actual price shock experienced by ordinary consumers.

Why are retail prices rising much faster than contract prices? Because the consumer market is a “residual allocation market.” NAND manufacturers prioritize fulfilling long-term framework agreements with major clients, including AI data center operators and large-scale cloud service providers. Only after fulfilling these orders do the remaining inventory enter the distribution channels for consumer markets. Supply is constrained, and the buffer capacity of the spot market to absorb price increases is nearly zero, causing retail price hikes to be steeper than those in contract prices.

Kingston publicly confirmed this year that their NAND wafer procurement costs have increased by 246% compared to a year ago. This is a raw material cost shock that ultimately propagates through product prices to consumers step by step.

How AI is driving up the price of a storage card

This chart highlights two key nodes worth discussing separately.

The first is around October 2025, when relatively low-priced storage cards became available on the market. This period marked the tail end of the previous oversupply cycle. From 2023 to 2024, major storage manufacturers accumulated large inventories amid weakening demand, causing prices to decline continuously. Photographers, creators, and gamers took advantage of this window to stock up on storage cards at historically low prices.

The second node is the fourth quarter of 2025. Samsung, Kioxia, Micron, and SK Hynix announced successive production cuts and price hikes, rapidly reversing the situation. Samsung increased prices for enterprise clients by over 100%, and Kioxia explicitly stated that all its 2026 production capacity had been pre-sold to major clients, cutting off supply to the consumer market.

Since then, retail prices for storage cards have been climbing steadily, expected to reach $50–$60 by mid-2026, with no signs of a correction throughout the year. This is not market speculation but a structural adjustment in supply and distribution mechanisms. Before AI data centers became the NAND market’s top buyers, consumer and enterprise products shared capacity roughly equally. Now, the consumer side is at the end of the distribution chain.

This time, it’s completely different from 2017

The NAND industry experiences a price cycle roughly every three to four years. The last significant price increase occurred between 2016 and 2017, lasting nearly two years. That cycle was triggered by the transition from 2D NAND to 3D NAND technology. The new stacking process slowed effective output during the yield ramp-up phase, tightening supply and pushing prices higher. But once the 3D NAND production lines stabilized and yields improved, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron expanded capacity significantly, causing inventories to shift from shortages to oversupply, and prices rebounded downward in early 2018.

This time, the driving forces are entirely different, and the recovery path is also distinct.

According to TrendForce data, global NAND demand growth in 2026 is expected to reach 20–22%, while supply growth will only be 15–17%. The absolute gap isn’t large, but in a massive market, a few percentage points of supply-demand imbalance can trigger extremely volatile price reactions. More importantly, this gap isn’t caused by technological issues but by structural shifts in demand. AI data centers continuously and massively consume NAND capacity with high priority, and this demand has no ceiling.

Additional capacity to ease supply tightness will only arrive around late 2027 to 2028. NAND production lines at Samsung’s P4 plant in Pyeongtaek, Micron’s new wafer fab in Idaho, and Kioxia’s Iwate plant expansion all point to this timeframe. 2026 will be the year of the largest supply-demand gap, not a price turning point.

Manufacturers aren’t lacking capacity—they are actively selling capacity to the highest bidders

The diagram below illustrates the core mechanism behind this price increase. In the NAND industry’s revenue structure, enterprise-grade products (AI data center SSDs, general server storage) are rapidly gaining market share. Industry estimates suggest that enterprise products accounted for about 45% of total NAND revenue in 2024, rising to approximately 62% in 2026, while consumer and client markets shrank from 55% to about 38%.

The driving logic behind this shift is straightforward: for the same wafer area, producing high-density enterprise QLC SSDs yields 3–5 times higher profit per unit than producing consumer storage cards. Manufacturers like Kioxia and Samsung allocate capacity based on maximizing profits, prioritizing the highest-paying buyers.

This mechanism also has a hidden effect: as available inventory in the consumer market decreases, distributors and retailers accelerate stocking to hedge against future price increases, further speeding up inventory depletion on the consumer side, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of rising prices.

For consumers, storage card prices will remain high for a considerable period—not because wafer capacity is insufficient, but because the system-level priority of consumer market allocation has been lowered. Only when the pace of AI infrastructure development slows and excess wafer capacity re-enters the consumer supply chain will prices stabilize, which is expected after 2027.

The SD card in your camera and the world’s largest AI data center are using the same wafer. Now you know who’s winning.