Enterprise SSDs will become more expensive: SanDisk plans up to 100% increase in NAND in 2026

It is unclear to what extent the price increase for high-capacity 3D NAND will affect prices for conventional flash memory used in consumer devices. Normally, 3D NAND for smartphones and PCs follows enterprise-grade chips as they are manufactured in the same factories.

The note to clients from Nomura Securities states that “market checks indicate that several memory vendors have continued to increase prices” and highlights that enterprise-grade NAND is facing “especially aggressive” increases.

Then, she warns that “SanDisk NAND used in enterprise SSDs could see an increase of more than 100% quarter-over-quarter in the March period.”

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Analyzing the numbers

Nomura Securities is a leading financial analysis firm with strong contacts in the high-tech sector. She attributes memory vendors’ plans to raise prices for enterprise-grade 3D NAND memory to both short-term shortages and medium-term demand growth.

And this increase is not new, being driven by the high demand for Artificial Intelligence data centers.

In fact, Nomura cites NVIDIA’s Inference Context Memory Storage Platform (ICMSP) as one of the main drivers of demand for enterprise storage this year. The platform is based on the BlueField-4 DPU and equipped with a 512 GB SSD that supports KV cache.

Each compute tray in the VR NVL144 rack comes with a BlueField-4 data processing unit with a 512 GB disk, totaling 18 DPUs with 9,216 TB of 3D NAND per rack.

So, assuming NVIDIA ships 50,000 NVL144 VR racks per year, the company will need to source approximately 0.439 EB of 3D NAND from somewhere. And partners supplying their versions of NVL144 VR racks with BlueField-4 DPUs will also increase 3D NAND memory consumption this year with the Vera Rubin platform.

Weighting

However, even though NVIDIA’s ICMSP could consume about an exabyte of 3D NAND per year in 2026-2027, in the best case scenario, this does not justify a sudden doubling of the price of 3D NAND, as the industry produces more than 800 EB of NAND annually.

Furthermore, it is not yet known how much 3D NAND a typical NVL144 VR machine uses. And this means that one can estimate storage demand for Rubin-based platforms in general.

However, as the demand for AI systems for storage is skyrocketing, there will inevitably be an increase in demand. And as it exceeds supply, prices will rise, which is exactly what is happening.

At Kabum, there is a significant variety of SSDs available, at various prices. And, even if the increase does not reach 100% of the price, it should happen. The models start at R$299.99 (250 GB, SATA III), but there is an M.2 model with 240GB for R$319.60.

Moving on to higher performance models, a 1 TB SATA III SSD costs R$ 776.97. And again, there is a 1TB option, but M.2 2280 NVMe for R$776.66. It is more interesting than the R$604.56 option, a 500 GB M.2 PCie 3.0 SSD.

Source: @jukan05.

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