Insatiable demand for solid-state storage from AI data centres has near-enough destroyed the consumer SSD market, according to a high-ranking executive at Silicon Motion. While current availability and prices are dire for any budding PC builder, the road ahead sadly doesn’t look any brighter.
In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Silicon Motion SVP Nelson Duann damningly declared, “the retail SSD market has almost disappeared.” As part of one of the largest solid-state drive controller manufacturers in the world, Duann has witnessed a dramatic shift in storage supply first-hand.
Duann explains that demand from module makers, the companies that produce the final SSDs we pop in our PCs, remains strong for Silicon Motion. However, instead of those drives finding their way to consumers via retailers, supply priorities have switched to large PC manufacturers (HP, Dell, Lenovo, and so on) instead.
Prior to the ongoing NAND shortage, OEMs were able to reliably source stock from memory manufacturers, but this traditional method of procurement has fallen away because of demand from AI data centres. Now, the companies are left with little choice but to source from module makers instead, in turn leaving consumers with perilously little stock, naturally driving storage prices upward.
Unfortunately, Duann doesn’t see the situation improving anytime soon. “I expect this situation to continue through the second half of the year,” he says. “Looking into 2027, NAND makers are quite pessimistic. They believe supply constraints will worsen, because cloud service providers and data centre operators continue to increase their demand.”
In short, picking up a new SSD for your PC isn’t likely to get any easier in the near future. Speaking as someone whose primary M.2 drive is on the fritz, anyone in need of new storage has all my sympathy.
