SSDs: First price increases on the horizon
AI servers are shaking up the entire storage market. End customer SSDs could also become more expensive as a result.
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Market observers expect prices for NAND flash components to rise by the end of the year and beyond. This could also cause SSD prices to rise, albeit moderately at first.
Trendforce, a market observer specialising in memory, assumes that NAND flash prices rose by an average of 3 to 8 percent in the third quarter, which will soon be over. An increase of 5 to 10 per cent is on the cards for the fourth quarter.
The price increases are said to be due to the high demand from data centres for AI applications. Hyperscalers such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and xAI are currently building huge data centres for hundreds of billions of US dollars. As HDDs for data storage have already become scarce, companies are increasingly switching to high-capacity SSDs. The increasing deliveries of servers with Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators are expected to exacerbate the shortage in this market segment.
Manufacturers react
Memory manufacturers are said to have already reacted to the change in demand and switched parts of their production to suitable NAND flash components. The focus is on chips with quadruple level cells (QLC), which write four bits per cell and thus enable particularly high capacities.
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The only reason why the impact on end customer SSDs has apparently not yet been seen is because demand there is restrained. According to Trendforce, PC manufacturers are also ordering few SSDs at the moment; stocks in the intermediate trade are said to be well filled again. Most popular M.2 SSDs have become a few Euros more expensive at most in recent months.
SSD manufacturers are currently reorganising their delivery plans for 2026. This is another reason why there is currently no forecast for how prices could develop in the coming year.
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