I just looked at the price of memory cards on Amazon and well, that was a very fast way to ruin my day. Experts have previously forewarned that the rise of generative AI would increase demand for storage – and based on the prices of everything from external SSDs to memory cards, photographers are already beginning to see the effects.
When browsing through memory cards gave me a serious case of sticker shock, I turned to an Amazon price tracker to see just how much the price of several favorite memory card brands has changed over the past few months. A 256GB UHS-II SD card from SanDisk costs about $100 more right now than it did a year ago. Lexar’s 256GB UHS-I Silver is about twice its average cost right now.
Even a budget 256GB UHS-I from SanDisk costs twice as much as the average right now. Smaller cards aren’t immune either – like Lexar’s 256GB UHS-II microSD card from the gold series that averages around $59, but is currently $135.
The unusually high prices aren’t just in the US – which may also be impacted by tariff changes as well as AI. A SanDisk 128GB Extreme Pro UHS-II card that averages about £52 at Amazon UK is at its highest ever price of £119.19 right now.
The price change doesn’t seem to be even across every brand or format. This Lexar CFexpress card is only a little higher than its $160 average, though that’s more than twice its Black Friday price.
Memory cards aren't the only storage format affected, either – the price of external hard drives has also risen, and the DRAM crisis is also expected to affect the price of devices like laptops and smartphones. The high demand for DRAM could potentially also impact cameras themselves – Canon recently told investors that two-thirds of the estimated ¥6 to 7 billion predicted DRAM cost increase for 2026 is for the imaging division.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the increasing cost of memory cards right now is that the culprit is something that many photographers are already frustrated with: artificial intelligence. Adding the rising cost of SD cards to take real pictures with real cameras is like delivering a knock-out punch to someone who is already writhing on the ground. Creators are already fighting to keep their images out of training data, worrying about the rising cost of software, and stressing about keeping the work coming in in the age of AI.
There’s never a good time for prices to increase, but the rising cost of memory cards and external hard drives comes at a time when both megapixel counts and burst speeds are increasing. Cameras with 100MP are no longer hard to find, and the burst speed for still photos is now rivaling that of video frame rates. (Videographers, are you okay right now?!?)
That means cameras are filling memory cards both with larger files and more images at a time when those cards are becoming rapidly more expensive – all thanks to a technology that wants to compete with photography using copyrighted images scraped from the internet.
Whenever a creator is looking at a gear purchase, factoring the cost of accessories should be part of that decision – and that’s especially true with memory cards right now.
If memory card prices continue in the same direction, the memory crisis may, like film photography, serve as a reminder for quality over quantity – because leaving your camera on burst mode and storing a backlog of extra images is rapidly becoming quite expensive.
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