NAND Demand and SSD Prices to Increase Sharply Due to AI Demand
But pretty soon, prices start increasing very significantly for all NAND-based products, including consumer SSD. The reason behind it all is that the major NAND suppliers are raising their prices to be able to meet the huge demand for enterprise storage solutions being experienced by the AI industry.
AI Data Center Growth Fuels Enterprise Storage Demand
Thus, the growing capacity of AI data center construction generates a tremendous demand for enterprise storage solutions. Vast datasets come as the main containers in training models for large language modeling (LLM) purposes. As data center computing power worldwide grows, so does the requirement for storage, parallelly. NAND firms are thus aligning price adjustments to this scenario of above-normal demand.
Major NAND Suppliers Announce Price Hikes
This price adjustment has been initiated by several leading NAND suppliers. According to sources from supply chains:
- An official announcement has been made by Western Digital concerning modifications to its price structure for NAND.
- Expected to increase prices for NAND products by as much as 10% is SanDisk.
- According to Micron, a price increase of significant proportions, as high as 30%, is expected, though the firm has yet to officially inform its customers.
In a significant market signal, major NAND suppliers have reportedly stopped providing price quotes to customers, indicating that the supply chain is currently adjusting to the situation.
Impact on Consumer SSD and HDD Prices
This will be seen also in the consumer categories and not just in the enterprise segment. It may well happen that prices would soar to the sky for NAND products oriented toward consumers like SSDs. Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), which do not use NAND chips but serve as cold storage for raw AI datasets, are also expected to be influenced by this market shift, though any price rise for them is not anticipated to be as aggressive as for SSDs.
