The effects of artificial intelligence on hardware manufacturing are many and great in magnitude, as companies scramble to gain a competitive edge with the latest components. While much media attention has surrounded demand for GPUs in service of AI, data centres are also placing great pressure on NAND supply too.
In fact, we may be staring down a decade-long shortage of NAND flash. That’s according to Phison Electronics CEO, Pua Khein-Seng. Should their forecast prove true, expect the price of consumer RAM and SSDs to remain high with further price rises seeming likely.
Speaking to Taiwanese CommonWealth Magazine, Pua highlights that cloud-providers can’t rely on GPUs alone. “To make money, you need users. Users create data. Data needs to be stored. Which means data centres must expand storage for the next decade. After all, a data centre’s core function is storage.”
While data centres use a mix of HDDs and SSDs for their storage needs, technological demands and pricing are pushing them towards the latter. This naturally creates greater pressure on NAND supply as demand increases.
Pua claims the percentage of SSDs in data centres has risen from single digits in 2020 to a whopping 20% in 2025. They believe that solid state storage will eventually account for “80-100%”, presumably in a short space of time given the rapid increase in adoption over the past half-decade.
It’s no wonder that efforts to bring PCIe 6.0 storage to market are almost entirely within the enterprise realm and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Both Micron and Samsung have each revealed professional SSDs sporting the interface and there’s little immediate appetite from AMD or Intel to bring support to consumer motherboards.
There are some that disagree with Pua’s outlook. Western Digital, for example, stepped away from SSD manufacturing entirely to focus solely on producing HDDs, specifically highlighting the demands of the AI market as one of the reasons for doing so.
Forecasts aren’t certain, particularly decade-long ones. Regardless, Pua’s perspective at the very least highlights that both businesses and consumers should prepare for a shift in the RAM and SSD market in the years to come, characterised by the guiding hand of AI.
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