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This shouldn't come as a surprise to folks around here, but now we're being told by the source(s) of memory cards and more.
If you're in our industry, you already know that storage prices are going through the roof due to AI datacenter needs. Not only storage, but RAM, DRAM Flash Memory and a lot more in the industry will see significant price increases through 2026.
SanDisk is now sounding the alarm about what's coming as far as pricing and supply will likely go. It's not good.
It Has Already Started
They are warning that this situation is going to affect more than just memory cards. There will also be increases in DRAM Flash memory used in cameras, which will potentially increase the prices of cameras, unless the manufacturers are prepared to eat the cost of production increases.
When do they ever do that?
Larger capacity RAM and M.2 drives have already spiked excessively. The datacenters want large capacity products. This will likely also affect lower capacity cards as manufacturers focus on datacenter needs over consumer needs.
I have been told by two memory card makers that prices will see “large price increases” in the coming months. I am not allowed to name the companies for obvious reasons.
Shop Memory Cards
I Have Already Seen the Crazy
A year ago, I purchased two Corsair DDR5 128GB (2x64gb) kits. At the time, they were selling for around $350 USD for each 128GB set. That same RAM now costs $1250 for each pair. I have not seen it for less than that for quite some time. This is going to kill gaming and workstation computer builds.
I am seeing it with hosting companies. The company that Canon Rumors uses for dedicated hosting has raised some RAM upgraded plans up to $200/mth. Which is insane. That is going to raise the costs of online commerce, smaller retailers can't eat that.
I suspect we're going to see the same thing with all hosting companies eventually as well as companies like Spotify, Shopify or any other big companies doing business online.
Google & Apple
Both Google and Apple are buying all of this stuff up like crazy I have been told. Both companies are being told that their backorders won't be filled for two years. Companies like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are likely experiencing the same thing.
Consumer Retailers
I have been told by a couple of retailers that certain brands are cancelling backorders on memory and hard drives. It sounds like they'll be told when they can order more. That is going to hit retailers hard, there is some margin on memory products, and they are an easy upsell.
Increasing Manufacturing Capacity?
While I can't confirm this information as I'm not in the industry, new facilities to manufacture this stuff can take up to two years to get rolling. There is no immediate relief coming.
Compact Cameras
There are going to be a lot of compact cameras coming in 2026. Some of those cameras are going to use Micro-SD cards. DJI already uses these cards in most of their consumer drones. The supply of MicroSD cards is going to be stressed.
There is a real possibility that supply for consumers is going to completely dry up. I don't think that's hyperbole. We can't know for sure, but the extreme price hikes are starting to take shape.
I'm not telling you how to spend your money, but if you think you're going to need more storage in any capacity, I would be working that into your business plans as well as your own personal needs for cameras, computers, tablets and a lot of other products.
Older stock is still out there, but once it's gone we're going to see things double or triple in price.
Again, I'm not claiming to be the foremost expert. I'm happy that I felt this was coming and didn't have to pay the new prices on M.2 & SSD RAID drives along with my RAM purchase last year.
As always, consumers can't have nice things when industries go sideways.
1. Cancel the order entirely.
2. Cancel the order and resubmit at a much higher price ($2.5m) but still with no firm delivery date set.
3. Keep the current order & current pricing but with the understanding that it probably wouldn't be fulfilled until mid or late 2027 at the earliest, and maybe not until sometime in 2028.
This is impacting everyone, and it will get worse before it gets better. Protect your computers with UPSes and expect to not upgrade or replace anything for the next ~2.5 years unless there is a dramatic & unexpected change in the market. Personally I'm going to be hosting most of my personal work off my home server for the foreseeable future. Thankfully I have uncapped fiber that is faster than most people could dream of, but it's still far from an ideal situation.
In other bad news, the massive increase in hardware costs is almost certain to result in job losses. When new projects can't move forward, the result will not be good for employees.
Thanks for the input, it's worse than I thought it was and going to be. I hadn't thought about the impact to employment.
I'm currently negotiating paying for hosting 2 years up front. Even electricity is going to go up and that's a big cost. For those that don't know, you pay for CPU and GPU wattage use. I changed processors recently to cut that by half. You can go Ampere arm, but the processors cost double, so the offset in costs is 0.
Not only computers and memory cards, but also cars, drones, home appliances, phones are all full of chips and memory. All will be affected.
We may see a return of "dumb" appliances and less gizmos in cars. I have already tried and configuring a desktop the way I like it is becoming prohibitively expensive.
There are all sorts of side effects to this. Taiwan may become more appetizing to China given how much of worldwide chip production is there....
So much money has been pumped in AI and in the infrastructure for AI that they have to keep investing in it otherwise it will all unravel and a lot of companies will lose a lot of money. So this is going to go on for a while, at least until AI shows some real return to those investments.
The big hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft, Google, possibly including Nvidia, Meta and Apple and Samsung) will be ok because they command large %'s of the market. All the rest will suffer. Camera makers are small bit players in this context, so they will be impacted
Samsung's memory division has made it clear that their own phone division is facing the same pricing as everyone else. Apple sent top execs to camp out in Seoul to try to negotiate access and pricing, with little apparent success.
The AI bubble popping would likely trigger pricing resets, but with so much of the US equity markets made up of the top AI/tech companies now (and likely to get worse with upcoming IPOs), the end of the AI bubble would bring about other huge problems. We may end up just being stuck with this for a couple of years until more capacity comes online around 2028.
Good thing I stocked up in time, but eventually that will run out too. I hope things will return to normal by 2028 at the latest, better 2027...
I found it interesting that Apple didn’t make its new M5 MacBook Pro more expensive than the M4. Normally, they would have had to raise prices by at least 20–30%, if not even more.
For someone starting in 2026 it will be rough. Cameras are small fishes and in comparison our problems are minors, but for someone that enjoy gaming playing in high quality will not be an option anymore.
But yeah, my mega-build from late 2024 would now cost almost 2.5x as much as it did. RAM, GPUs, and m.2 SSDs all have had crazy inflation.
All for worthless generative AI models run by a bunch of companies that don't make a profit and have no remotely plausible path to profit. And we're still pretty far from the bubble popping.
Personally I try to stay away from it as much as possible but I will admit that it creates some great memes!