(ECNS) -- Shares of memory and storage companies have broadly risen amid growing AI-related demand, with SanDisk jumping 37.12 percent in a single week as of Friday, according to financial services firm Morningstar Brands.
Sandisk may raise enterprise SSD NAND prices by more than 100% quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter of 2026, according to a report by Nomura Securities.
Nomura attributed the planned price hikes to short-term supply shortages as well as medium-term growth in AI-driven demand for server-class storage.
The deeper reason behind rising storage prices lies in internal contradictions within the semiconductor industry, said Tang Zhimin, dean of the School of Computing Power and Microelectronics at Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology.
He said processors, including CPUs and GPUs, and memory devices such as DRAM and NAND flash are the two core components of information technology infrastructure. While both are essential to product development, they occupy very different positions in the industrial value chain, with processors in a dominant role and memory products in a more subordinate one.
Tang mentioned the widespread belief that processors are technologically sophisticated while memory is not. In fact, he explained that memory products are manufactured using the most advanced semiconductor processes, thus they are challenging.
Industry analysts also note that under AI-driven restructuring, the storage market is shifting from consumer-led growth to technology-driven demand. As AI model training and inference sharply increase requirements for memory capacity, potential shortages of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DDR5 could ripple through the broader storage industry chain.
(By Gong Weiwei)
京公网安备 11010202009201号