It's a story that has become well publicized during 2026: the rising price of solid state storage and memory cards. Everything from portable SSDs to CFexpress cards has seen huge price rises since the start of the year, and the global shortage of NAND flash memory has also been felt in the wider electronics sector, with the cost of games consoles and phones also increasing.
It's left many people asking when the memory crisis will end. However, the general consensus is - sadly - that prices probably won't be coming down significantly any time soon. This analysis was echoed by Roman Rabitsch, founder of Angelbird, in a recent interview with Cine D. Rabitsch points out that during COVID NAND flash and DRAM production was high but demand relatively low, which in turn kept prices down. He says that at one point memory was even being sold at a loss in order to clear stock.
Yet in a fairly short timeframe since then we've seen the rise of AI and its insatiable appetite for HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) in AI data centers. Consequently, memory manufacturers have been diverting their resources to produce this highly lucrative commodity, leaving reduced supply of the NAND flash used in camera memory cards and SSDs. And as we know, when supply is tight, prices rise, which is why we've seen such a relentless increase in the cost of memory cards throughout 2026.
This now means the output of memory fabrication plants is already allocated for years to come, with capacity sold out until 2029-2030. So with this in mind, should you bite the bullet and buy storage and memory cards now, in case prices rise still further in the coming months/years?
Rabitsch suggests there probably isn’t a need to panic buy flash memory products right now. He says the availability and pricing of memory looks like it may remain fairly stable for the next 2-3 years, with a potential for a price drop in late 2027, though this may only be in the region of 2-5%. While this outlook suggests prices might not continue to rocket, it does unfortunately confirm what other industry analysts have reported: that prices won’t be dropping significantly for several years.
