SSD price increases might be with us for the long haul, as Phison's CEO says NAND supply won't catch up with demand for four years

The ongoing memory and SSD crisis shows no signs of abating, with Phison's CEO, Pua Khein-Seng, predicting that NAND flash prices will continue to rise as demand far outpaces new production capacity. According to Commercial Times, it will take four years for new plant construction to translate into actual supply, potentially delaying the market arrival of new NAND-producing facilities until 2030 or beyond.

Phison is taking steps to ensure stable supply over the next two years, but the bottleneck remains NAND supply. This situation mirrors the challenges faced by Micron executive Sumit Sadana, who emphasized the difficulty of quickly scaling new memory wafer fabs to meet AI demand. AI infrastructure customers are projected to increase demand from late this year into early 2027, and Phison is reallocating resources away from the retail market and toward enterprise and AI applications.

While DRAM supply concerns may ease somewhat with newer, lightweight AI models, the massive data requirements of AI servers will need ample storage, potentially exacerbating the issue. With AI demand expected to surge, supply constrained, and new production facilities still years away, Phua predicts a bleak outlook for consumers, with SSD prices likely to remain high well into the future.