Memory Card Prices Double in Four Months — How Long Will the Rally Last?

Since the beginning of this year, NAND flash memory prices have entered a new cycle of rapid increase, with retail prices of consumer-grade storage products being the first to feel the impact. In October 2025, a SanDisk Extreme 128GB microSD card was selling for $17 on Amazon. By February of this year, the price of the same card had climbed to nearly $40. That's a 130% increase in less than four months.

First, it's important to clarify the difference between RAM (memory modules) and memory cards, as they are not the same type of product. RAM (memory modules) are temporary storage inside a computer, used for data reading and writing while programs are running; data is lost when power is cut. Memory cards (like microSD cards) are external expansion storage used for long-term saving of files like photos and videos; data is retained without power. The price increases discussed in this article refer to the latter: memory cards and the underlying NAND flash memory chips.

The continuous rise in memory card prices reflects a systemic repricing of the entire NAND flash market. The starting point of this repricing is AI data centers competing for the same batch of wafers.

Contract Prices Rose 50%, But by the Time It Reaches You, It's 130%

First, let's talk about what's happening.

Global NAND flash contract prices began climbing rapidly starting late last year. According to a report released by market research firm TrendForce in February of this year, overall NAND contract prices for Q1 2026 increased by approximately 55–60% compared to Q4 2025, with Enterprise SSD prices surging 53–58%, setting a new record for single-quarter increases. TrendForce also predicts that overall NAND contract prices will rise another 70–75% in the second quarter.

These figures represent the bulk contract unit prices negotiated between large clients, not directly equal to the retail sticker prices on e-commerce platforms. However, retail prices on the consumer end are rising even more sharply than contract prices. The rightmost bar in Figure 1, representing 130%, is the price shock truly felt by ordinary consumers.

Why is the retail increase far exceeding the contract increase? Because the consumer end is a "residual allocation market." When NAND manufacturers formulate delivery plans, they prioritize fulfilling orders for large clients with long-term framework agreements, including AI data center operators and hyperscale cloud service providers. Only after these shipments are completed does the remaining inventory enter the distribution channels for the consumer market. With supply compressed, the spot market has almost zero buffer capacity against price increases, making the retail price surge steeper than the contract price surge.

Kingston publicly confirmed this year that its procurement cost for NAND wafers has increased by 246% compared to a year ago. This is a raw material-level cost shock that is ultimately passed down to consumers through product prices at each stage.

How AI Pushed Up the Price of a Memory Card

There are two key nodes in this chart worth discussing separately.

The first is around October 2025, when relatively low-priced memory cards were available on the market. That period was at the tail end of the previous cycle of oversupply. From 2023 to 2024, major memory manufacturers accumulated large inventories in a weakening demand environment, leading to continuously declining prices. Photographers, creators, and gamers stocked up on large quantities of memory cards at historically low prices during that window.

The second node is the fourth quarter of 2025. Samsung, Kioxia, Micron, and SK Hynix successively announced production cuts and price increases, completely flipping the situation in a short time. Samsung raised prices for enterprise clients by over 100%, and Kioxia explicitly stated that its entire 2026 production capacity had been pre-sold to large clients, directly cutting off supply to the consumer market.

Since then, the retail price of memory cards has been climbing steadily and is expected to reach the $50–60 range by mid-2026, with no window for a pullback throughout the year. This is not market speculation but a structural adjustment in the supply allocation mechanism. Before AI data centers became the highest-priority buyers in the NAND market, consumer and enterprise products participated roughly equally in capacity allocation. Now, the consumer end is the last recipient in the allocation chain.

This Time, It's Completely Different from 2017

The NAND industry experiences a price cycle approximately every three to four years. The last typical price surge occurred in 2016–2017 and lasted nearly two years. That round was triggered by the technological transition from 2D NAND to 3D NAND. The new stacking process slowed effective output during the yield ramp-up phase, tightening supply and pushing up prices. However, once 3D NAND production lines at various manufacturers stabilized yields, and Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron simultaneously expanded production significantly, inventory quickly slid from shortage to surplus, causing prices to plummet in early 2018.

The driving force this time is completely different, and therefore the recovery path is also截然不同.

According to TrendForce data, global NAND demand growth in 2026 is projected to be 20–22%, while supply-side growth is only 15–17%. The absolute gap isn't huge, but in a market of massive scale, a few percentage points of supply-demand imbalance can trigger extremely sharp price reactions. More importantly, this gap isn't caused by technical issues but by a structural shift in demand. AI data centers are consuming NAND capacity in a sustained, massive, and high-priority manner, and the scale of this demand has no ceiling.

New capacity to alleviate supply tightness won't arrive until late 2027 to 2028. Samsung's NAND production lines at its Pyeongtaek P4 complex in Gyeonggi Province, Micron's new wafer fab in Idaho, USA, and Kioxia's expansion at its Iwate plant all point to this timeframe. 2026 is the year with the largest supply-demand gap, not the turning point for prices.

Manufacturers Aren't Lacking Capacity; They're Actively Selling It to the Highest Bidder

The chart below illustrates the fundamental mechanism behind this price surge. Within the NAND industry's revenue structure, the share of enterprise products (AI data center SSDs, general server storage) is rapidly expanding. According to comprehensive estimates by industry organizations, the proportion of enterprise products in overall NAND revenue has risen from about 45% in 2024 to approximately 62% in 2026, while the share of the consumer and client market has been compressed from 55% to about 38%.

The logic driving this shift is straightforward: per unit of wafer area, producing enterprise-grade high-density QLC SSDs yields 3–5 times higher unit profit compared to producing consumer-grade memory cards. Capacity allocation by manufacturers like Kioxia and Samsung follows the principle of maximizing commercial benefit, allocating the best wafers to the highest-paying buyers.

This mechanism has another hidden effect. When available inventory in the consumer market shrinks, distributors and retailers accelerate their stockpiling to hedge against future price increases, which further accelerates inventory drawdown on the consumer end, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of price increases.

For consumers, memory card prices will remain elevated for a considerable period, not because wafer capacity is insufficient, but because the allocation priority of the consumer market has been systematically lowered. Only when the pace of AI computing infrastructure construction slows will excess wafer capacity return to the consumer goods supply chain, but that won't happen until after 2027.

The SD card in your camera and the world's largest AI data center are using wafers from the same batch. Now you know who's winning.