Market perspective – a service provider’s point of view
The global memory market is undergoing one of the most abrupt structural shifts of the past decade. Recent NAND Flash market data clearly signals a new reality: technology is no longer just a competitive advantage, it has become a prerequisite for survival. After a prolonged period of oversupply, the end of 2025 marks a sharp reversal, characterized by depleted inventories, accelerating demand, and price increases that are placing direct pressure on corporate IT budgets.
According to market data, leading manufacturers such as Samsung and SK Hynix have deliberately reduced NAND production capacity to redirect investments toward AI-driven, high-end memory solutions (HBM). This strategic shift, combined with prolonged weakness in the consumer segment (smartphones and laptops), has resulted in a structural supply gap, precisely now when enterprise and AI-related demand is surging.
SSD and RAM: From Commodity to Strategic Asset
Price increases are unprecedented. Estimates from Counterpoint Research indicate quarterly NAND price growth exceeding 40%, with enterprise SSDs seeing increases of 53–58%. In some cases, suppliers raised NAND prices by over 100% within a single quarter. On the spot market, SSDs now trade at premiums of 25–35% over contract prices, while certain capacities (notably 128GB) already carry transaction premiums of up to 50%.
This pressure directly impacts the RAM market as well, where constrained supply and the rapid transition toward AI-ready platforms are driving up total infrastructure costs. In this environment, postponing hardware upgrades is no longer a conservative decision, it is a strategic risk.
How Rising Memory Costs Change Technology Usage
Organizations operating on undersized SSDs or legacy memory architectures are increasingly exposed to tangible operational limitations:
- higher latency and slower processing times;
- bottlenecks in virtualization, analytics, and AI workloads;
- reduced ability to deploy modern cybersecurity and real-time monitoring tools;
- rising operational costs over the medium term.
In a digital economy, IT performance directly translates into business performance. Every delay in data access or critical application processing impacts productivity, decision-making speed, and ultimately competitiveness.
Core Risk: Performance Stagnation
Market projections estimate global NAND revenues will exceed USD 147 billion by 2026, representing a year-over-year growth of more than 110%. This confirms that current conditions are not a short-term imbalance, but rather the result of deep structural changes in the memory industry.
Companies that fail to proactively adapt their IT strategies, by investing in enterprise-grade SSDs, adequate RAM capacity, and scalable architectures, risk becoming trapped in a low-performance environment. Such stagnation severely limits the adoption of artificial intelligence, automation, and advanced analytics, all of which are rapidly becoming baseline requirements across industries.
EXPERT IT Positioning
In this context, EXPERT IT advocates a strategic, forward-looking approach rather than a reactive one:
- early and planned procurement of SSD and RAM resources;
- prioritization of enterprise-grade solutions over consumer hardware;
- infrastructure design with a 3–5 year performance horizon;
- integration of virtualization, failover, and advanced storage optimization technologies.
Technology may no longer be cheap, but the absence of modern technology is far more expensive. In a market where memory has become a critical resource, the gap between market leaders and laggards will be defined by how quickly organizations understand and act upon these shifts.
