Kioxia’s memory is “sold out” for 2026, prolonging a “high-end and expensive phase”
Companies that make RAM and flash memory chips are making record profits due to the AI-driven memory crisis — and they’re also indicating that they don’t expect conditions to improve much, if at all, in 2026. And while RAM kits have been hit hardest by shortages and price increases, we shouldn’t expect SSD prices to improve any time soon, either.
That’s the message from Shunsuke Nakato (via PC Gamer), general manager of the memory division of Kioxia, the Japanese memory company spun off from Toshiba in the late 2010s. Nakato says Kioxia’s manufacturing capacity will be exhausted until the end of 2026, driving the enterprise and consumer SSD market into a “high-end and expensive phase.”
“There is a sense of crisis that companies will be eliminated as soon as they stop investing in AI, so they will have no choice but to continue investing,” Nakato said, as reported by Korean-language publication Digital Daily. Absent a major shift in demand for generative AI data centers, this round of investments will keep prices elevated for the foreseeable future.
Nakato notes that Kioxia was trying to increase its manufacturing capacity to meet high demand, saying it was taking steps to improve yields at its Yokkaichi factory and that Kioxia expected another factory in Kitakami to begin “large-scale mass production” this year.
As we’ve seen in several chip shortages this decade, it takes time for chip shortages to subside because it takes years to build new factories and get them to produce a useful number of usable chips. Companies are also sometimes hesitant to add new capabilities too quickly, for fear that market conditions will change in the meantime and leave them with piles of expensive memory that they must heavily discount to sell.
