Consumer SSD Prices Poised to Surge as AI Drives Massive NAND Demand, Phison Warns

The artificial intelligence boom continues to reshape the global semiconductor supply chain, with storage solutions now facing the brunt of its impact. According to Phison’s Q3 2025 earnings call Finance report, the company’s CEO, Khein-Seng Pua, revealed that the current memory cycle is unlike anything the industry has ever seen. Average selling prices (ASPs) of NAND TLC memory have skyrocketed between 50% and 75% in just a few months, signaling that consumer SSDs and other NAND-based products are on the verge of significant price hikes.

Phison’s leadership emphasized that this unprecedented surge is being driven by AI inference workloads, which increasingly rely on NAND-based storage for model hosting, local LLM pre-loading, and rapid update synchronization. In modern data centers, SSDs are critical for ensuring low-latency startup times for AI applications, creating a ripple effect that’s tightening supply across the entire NAND ecosystem.

The company described the current market as “tight,” warning that pricing for NAND TLC products will likely remain elevated for the foreseeable future. For years, NAND manufacturers have faced a “demand drought” and hesitated to expand fab capacity after suffering from low profitability during and after the pandemic. However, with AI systems now consuming storage at an unprecedented pace, suppliers are starting to see a long-awaited profit recovery.

“We believe NAND company, they’re not willing to expand the fab until now because in the last five years from COVID until now, the total profit in the NAND still even. They're not making any good profits, but from now on they start to get profit,” said Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua.

The situation mirrors what occurred earlier with DRAM, where the initial rise in demand from AI and data centers led to dramatic increases in module pricing, doubling ASPs in many cases. Now, NAND appears to be following the same trajectory.

For consumers, this means SSD prices “particularly for high-capacity models” could see sharp increases heading into 2026. Those planning upgrades or new builds may find that the upcoming holiday sales represent one of the last opportunities to secure affordable SSDs before market prices adjust to this new AI-driven demand landscape.

Do you think the AI boom will permanently change SSD pricing, or will production eventually stabilize the market? Share your thoughts below.