There are new indicators that we are heading for yet another semiconductor famine , specifically memory chips. Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua, one of the world’s largest SSD companies, confirmed in the past few hours that NAND chip prices have more than doubled in the last six months or so , and the situation won’t improve anytime soon—we’re talking at least until the end of 2027. Manufacturers are already making moves to increase their production facilities, but between building development and machinery construction, this isn’t an operation that can be done overnight. The first warning signs had already emerged in recent days.
According to the CEO, the situation is such that the entire production planned for 2026 has already been sold , and demand is so high that even the prices of chips based on older, outdated technologies, such as MLC, are exploding. For reference, we also have a practical example: a 1 TB TLC chip that cost $4.80 this summer can now be found for as little as $10.70. This may seem like a small amount in isolation, but when you scale it up to large numbers, the situation becomes decidedly more complex, especially in the consumer world, which is inevitably left behind in favor of the enterprise world, which purchases in much higher volumes and has better profit margins.
t’s not hard to imagine the root cause of this situation: artificial intelligence . As we know, AI services require computing power that to call “enormous” is an understatement. We often focus on the hundreds of thousands of super-expensive GPUs because they capture the most attention, but often the real bottleneck is memory, which must be extremely fast to ensure a smooth flow of data: otherwise, we find ourselves in a situation where GPUs “produce” more data than they can transmit.
Precisely because of the rise of AI datacenters, more and more companies are making the switch from traditional mechanical HDDs, which are slower but still useful in contexts outside of AI, to SSDs, which are much faster and more suitable for use in AI datacenters. Phison has therefore announced, as SanDisk has done in the past, that it will raise the prices of its NAND chips, and in the meantime, it is enjoying extremely positive business momentum : revenue has increased 30% year-over-year.