The AI boom is making your memory cards more expensive – and Lexar doesn't bank on that changing any time soon

Have you noticed that the price of microSD cards and CFexpress cards hasn't been falling at the rate you might expect, or that the same budget that bought you 256GB a year ago now stretches only to 128GB? Well, there's a reason for it. And it's not manufacturing problems, or shipping disruptions, or any of the usual suspects. It's artificial intelligence.

I got a fresh insight into this recently, as part of a small group of European journalists on an exclusive trip to explore Lexar's Chinese operations first-hand (factories, labs, the lot), in the week the company marked its 30th anniversary. 

The access was genuine and the hospitality generous. But the most useful conversation of the whole trip wasn't in any of the polished presentation rooms. It came during a press conference, when I asked Lexar's representatives about memory card pricing, and why it isn't going the way anyone buying camera storage would like.

Back story

First, some background. Since around the middle of last year, the major NAND flash manufacturers have been reallocating production capacity away from consumer storage and toward the kind of high-density, high-endurance memory that AI infrastructure demands. Data centres, AI accelerators and the systems that run large language models eat enormous quantities of flash memory – and they pay more for it. The result is a squeeze on the supply available for cameras, drones, phones, and everything else the rest of us use.

Sitting in that briefing room, listening to Lexar's representatives field questions about European market share and product roadmaps, I pushed on this point directly. The answer I got was not what I expected from a corporate press event. "We have to accept that this situation could be long term," one rep said, "because the industry has been shifted to a new era." 

So let's be clear. Lexar doesn't see this as a temporary inconvenience to be managed through clever supply chain work. It's a structural change: one the company itself has to navigate because that's simply the world we're living in.

The centre of gravity has shifted

The downstream effect on buyers is tangible and already here. Twelve months ago, 256GB was the default sweet spot for microSD: the capacity most consumers bought without thinking too hard about it, whether for a DJI drone, an Insta360 action camera or a compact mirrorless. Lexar's figures suggest that centre of gravity has now shifted to 128GB, pushed down by rising prices that have quietly eroded the value proposition at the higher capacities. There's even renewed interest in 64GB from some distributors, and in bundling scenarios, 32GB; capacities that felt almost nostalgically small just a couple of years ago.

The position Lexar finds itself in is somewhat ironic. The company discontinued its 32GB and 64GB microSD cards some time ago, reasonably anticipating that demand would keep moving upward. Reintroducing those capacities quickly isn't straightforward. "We have thought about changing 256 back to 128," their representative told me. "We're ready for that. But 32 is a difficulty for us due to resource shortages."

Crucially, though, the response to the squeeze – which became clear across multiple conversations during the trip – is not to expand production and flood the market with lower-cost cards. It's to focus on where constrained supply can be put to best use: products that offer the strongest value proposition rather than simply the highest or lowest price point.

This has produced some genuinely interesting results. The world's first 2TB microSD Express card is one. A new range of AI-optimised storage products, which I saw demonstrated at the Shenzhen Innovation R&D lab, is another. But this does mean that affordable high-capacity cards are not the priority they once were. And I have to be honest, I get it.

Walking the production floors at Zhongshan and later visiting the packaging and testing facility at Longforce's Suzhou site (a joint venture between Longsys and Taiwanese semiconductor company PTI), the sheer complexity of modern flash memory production becomes viscerally apparent. These are not factories that can simply turn a dial to produce more of one thing and less of another. The retooling required to shift production priorities takes months, not days.

For photographers, the practical implication is this: the decade-long trend of flash storage getting cheaper every year has stalled, and the reasons are structural rather than cyclical. If you're planning to stock up on cards, the current moment is unlikely to look expensive in retrospect. And if you've been waiting for prices to fall before upgrading your storage, the industry's own representatives are quietly telling you not to hold your breath.