Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch

SanDisk’s 10% price hike meets demand-side resistance

• SanDisk aims to elevate market prospect by a 10% price increase, which has however been met with resistance from the demand end. With the peak season of stocking activities having concluded, the withering degree of end demand for the time being is unable to provide a support for prices, thus restricting suppliers’ price hikes within channels, and have yet to branch out to the retail market.

Nvidia and Kioxia target 100 million IOPS SSD in 2027

• The drives are projected to use a PCIe 7.0 interface to connect to GPUs in a peer-to-peer mode and will be exclusively designed for use in AI.

• Nvidia plans to use a couple of such SSDs — totalling a whopping 200 million IOPS — attached directly to its GPUs to boost AI performance. The 100 million IOPS SSD delivers 33 times more than that existing drives can achieve.

OpenAI's Stargate project to consume up to 40% of global DRAM output

• Samsung and SK hynix have inked preliminary agreements to supply undiced wafer memory to OpenAI’s massive Stargate data center initiative, projecting 900,000 DRAM wafers demand per month. Analysts predict that DRAM capacity could grow by 8.7% in 2025 to around 2.25 million WSPM.