SSD prices bottomed in mid-2023 and have risen in nearly every quarter since, with the steepest jumps in late 2025 and the first half of 2026. This is not retail greed and it is not a bubble in drives: it is a shortage of NAND Flash, the chips that make up most of an SSD, caused by a specific chain of events. Here is that chain, with sources.
Because AI data centers are buying the NAND. Hard-drive shortages pushed cloud providers to high-capacity QLC SSDs in 2025; they locked in supply with long-term agreements; NAND makers, still cautious after the 2023 losses, prioritised those high-margin enterprise orders and sold out 2026 capacity. Consumer SSDs became the lowest-priority allocation, so their prices follow contract prices up — the index is about 5.7× the mid-2023 trough — while new fabs will not ramp in volume before late 2027.
In 2025 the AI build-out ran into a shortage of nearline hard drives — the high-capacity drives data centers use for bulk storage. Lead times stretched, and cloud providers did the obvious thing: they redirected that storage demand to high-capacity QLC SSDs. TrendForce flagged the switch in September 2025 and projected NAND prices up 5–10% for the quarter on “spillover demand for QLC products”. In reality the quarter moved much faster: wafer contract prices rose over 60% in November alone and Sandisk raised prices by about 50%.
A hyperscaler buying exabytes for an AI cluster is not price-sensitive the way a PC builder is. Cloud providers secured allocation with multi-quarter purchase agreements, and NAND makers — drawn by far better margins on enterprise SSDs — shifted production toward them. Phison’s CEO said in November 2025 that every NAND manufacturer had told the company its 2026 capacity was sold out, and that the company itself was prioritising server customers over retail.
NAND makers lost heavily in 2023 and cut output to end the glut. That worked — the trough came in mid-2023 — but it left them cautious about investing in new fabs just as AI demand arrived. New production lines take years; TrendForce does not expect meaningful new capacity before late 2027, and the supply relief it projects for NAND begins only in the second half of 2027.
When supply is short, suppliers allocate to the products that earn the most. Enterprise SSDs come first. Client SSDs for PCs sit lower; eMMC/UFS parts for phones sit lowest of all because their production overlaps with enterprise SSD lines and earns less. NAND wafers — what smaller SSD brands buy to build drives — became the lowest-priority shipment category. The result is that a consumer SSD brand pays more for NAND and gets less of it, and with NAND roughly 90% of a drive’s bill of materials (Kingston, December 2025) there is nowhere else to absorb the cost. Kingston put the NAND cost increase at 246% between early 2025 and December 2025.
TrendForce’s own forecasts trace the arc: +8–13% in 4Q23, a strong 2024, a dip in 4Q24–1Q25 as inventories built, then +5–10% in 3Q25 and 4Q25 before the surge — +55–60% in 1Q26 (revised up from an initial +33–38%), +70–75% in 2Q26, +10–15% in 3Q26 and +15 to +20% forecast for 4Q26. The full table with a source for every quarter is on the SSD Price Index. Dated evidence of the realised moves in late 2025:
Mostly, yes. Consumer demand for PCs and phones has been weak throughout — weak enough that from 3Q26 it capped the pace of increases. The demand that is outrunning supply is enterprise storage for AI inference and training, and that is where every supplier says its growth is. The other ingredient is the supply side’s own caution after 2023: a shortage needs both a demand shock and a supply response that lags it, and this one has both.
Prices will not fall because of a sale or a new product launch; they fall when NAND supply loosens, which TrendForce currently dates to the second half of 2027. Until then the useful questions are narrower: is this listing fairly priced for today’s market (check it with the calculator), and is the drive worth its premium (compare specs on the main table). Our dated reading of the forecasts is here: Will SSD prices go down?