Latest data from market research firm Counterpoint shows that NAND flash memory prices are expected to rise by more than 40% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026. PC SSD prices have jumped 50% in just two weeks, fueling growing anxiety in the market.
Amid the sweeping wave of artificial intelligence, the semiconductor storage industry is undergoing an unprecedented reshuffle.
While South Korean giants Samsung and SK Hynix dominate the high-end market with HBM technology, a “Japan-US alliance” formed by Japan’s Kioxia and the US-based SanDisk has carved out its own space for survival and growth in the AI-driven NAND market through differentiated technical routes and market strategies.
As AI workloads shift from training to inference, data center demand for storage has fundamentally changed. NAND is no longer just a component for consumer electronics, but has become a critical part of AI infrastructure.
David Gockel, CEO of SanDisk, stated in an earnings call that data centers are expected to become the largest market for NAND for the first time in 2026.
This shift signals a complete change in industry drivers, and the era when smartphones and PCs dominated the storage cycle is coming to an end.
The price surge in the NAND market is not a short-term speculative move. Stacy Smith, Executive Chairman of Kioxia, pointed out that competitors are busy competing in the high-bandwidth memory market and have not invested heavily in high-density storage products such as solid-state drives required by AI data centers.
The alliance between Kioxia and SanDisk has a cooperation history of more than 25 years. The deep integration of the two companies in technology, production and marketing forms their core advantage in addressing the challenges of AI storage.
Through joint ventures and collaborative R&D, the two sides share the cost of expensive equipment and research expenses, achieving economies of scale to compete with South Korean storage giants. Recently, the two companies announced the extension of their long-term cooperation agreement for their Yokkaichi plant in Japan from the end of 2029 to the end of 2034.
The Kioxia-SanDisk alliance demonstrates a high degree of synergy and clear division of labor in its market strategy:
-
Kioxia: Focuses on supplying major electronics manufacturers in Japan and globally. It plans to launch a new SSD nearly 100 times faster than current products by 2027, and is cooperating with NVIDIA to develop GPU-direct attached SSDs that can partially replace HBM to increase GPU memory capacity.
-
SanDisk: Leads the consumer storage market and holds a strong position in enterprise SSDs in North America and other overseas markets. It focuses on integrating HBF into products from NVIDIA, AMD and Google, with mass production scheduled for late 2027 to early 2028.
。
|
