Kingston sounds the SSD pricing alarm as the corporate has seen a 246% enhance in NAND wafer costs, with the largest enhance 'throughout the final 60 days'
As if skyrocketing RAM costs wasn’t sufficient, Kingston’s Datacentre SSD Enterprise Supervisor Cameron Crandall says to anticipate rising SSD prices all through 2026, confirming what we already feared. Why? Crandall, who has labored at Kingston for 29 years, says the corporate is experiencing NAND wafer worth spikes the likes of which have by no means been seen earlier than.
In dialog with Mark Hachman on The Full Nerd Community podcast, Crandall received particular, saying there’s been “a 246% enhance in NAND pricing as in comparison with Q1 of 2025.” He later goes on to elaborate, “We only in the near past noticed a 70% enhance in NAND prices over… I believe it was a 60-day interval. So, that 250% I discussed earlier—70% of that was elevated throughout the final 60 days.”
As NAND flash chips make up about 90% of a single SSD’s Invoice of Supplies price, that is an particularly eye-watering uptick for each companies and basic shoppers alike. As such, Crandall presents a phrase of recommendation to anybody contemplating upgrading their rig’s storage: “Do it now and [don’t] wait, as a result of costs are going to proceed to go up.”
In different phrases, we have but to see simply how excessive SSD costs can go. Crandall goes on to say, “[If you want to pick up] an alternate storage resolution [like an external SSD], you already know, yeah, you may have the ability to cut back some price. However if you wish to have a local SSD plugged into your M.2 socket, my recommendation right now could be to not maintain off on that buy as a result of it is going to be dearer 30 days from now, and greater than doubtless it’s going to be dearer 30 days after that.”
We already know that reminiscence pricing is dire, with Framework, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, HP, and Dell all both having raised their costs or trying to take action very quickly. Analysis additionally factors in the direction of each RAM and SSDs spiking in worth subsequent 12 months. Crandall’s feedback merely additional verify that 2026 will doubtless be a really costly 12 months. Panic-buying in what stays of 2025 most likely is not one of the best technique, although.
Crandall sums up how we received right here succinctly, too, saying, “Massive knowledge centres do not need to get caught with out assets to have the ability to supply to their buyer base to run AI workloads. So, there’s been an enormous pull in of high-capacity SSDs, a number of DRAM, as a way to assist that. And what that has triggered is a worldwide scarcity in different markets and even hyper-scale. However it’s a trickle-down impact into the B2B and client area.” Could not have mentioned it higher ourselves.
However apart from hoovering up all of the system reminiscence and storage it might probably, AI might trigger yet one more flip out there for producers and distributors to climate. Crandall posits, “I hate to name it a bubble, but when there may be an AI bubble and we go into a large oversupply…it isn’t unimaginable to have a scenario the place spending stops, consumption stops, and now there is a flood of DRAM and NAND within the market.
“Perhaps an organization like Kingston is sitting now on very, very costly stock that we purchased up proper [before] a flip out there. So, we have got to be very cautious in how we handle stock in instances like this.”
As for Kingston itself within the right here and now, the corporate is not going to do a Micron, with Crandall stating, “We’ve got no plans to exit the consumer market.” Kingston can be apparently not one of many many sources “feeding hyperscale knowledge centres with SSDs,” not that that may depend for a lot—the reminiscence apocalypse will spare nobody.
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