Buy now or wait? SD card prices are shooting through the roof – here’s how to navigate the ‘memory crisis’

SD and micro SD cards have been reliable, cheap memory for years, but prices have shot through the roof in 2026. You can thank a ‘global memory crisis’ – a perfect storm of an AI ‘memory tax’, production pivot, strategic underproduction, and increasing component costs.

Take the standard SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO SDXC Class 10 V30 UHS-I card. As recently as Black Friday last year (November 28 2025), it cost less than £20, with a record-low price of £14 the previous year. Guess how much it costs now? Around £50 at the time of writing.

I’ve included a price tracker chart below for said card, and the 2026 price increase of approximately 100% is typically lower than most other standard-speed and capacity SD cards.

If you’re in the market for a high-speed, high-capacity SD card, price hikes are even more extreme, up to 300%. That’s even if a card is in stock – many historically readily available cards are out of stock or no longer available.

So what should you do? Buy now at these inflated prices before they further increase? Ride it out with the cards you already have in the hope that prices will come down again soon? It’s a widely discussed topic, and there’s no easy answer.

If you’re in desperate need of a new SD card, you’re going to have to suck up the extra layout, and now is likely the best time for what could be the next 18 months.

Industry analysts predict prices will continue to climb through the middle of 2026, and relief could be as long as 18 months away, once infrastructure is in place to increase global supply amidst an AI boom.

But if you’re doing OK with the supply you have, and believe you will be for the next 18 months, I’d argue against panic buying and make do with what you have.

Knowing the above, it should come as no surprise that there are no record-low prices for SD cards right now. But I’ve put together some of the most readily available cards that are least affected by the hikes, and of course, these are only cards that I would recommend as reliable, based on my own experience.

If you didn’t already know, Amazon features a price tracker for products it sells and ships, with 30-day and 90-day options – the latter clearly demonstrates the 2026 price hikes.

And a word of warning, if you do see great deals on SD cards from unknown brands, I would be highly cautious – the marketplace will likely fill with counterfeit, fake, unreliable capacity cards. Avoid.

For further information, check out our in-depth guide on how to navigate the memory crisis.

Today’s best SD card deals