Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
August 2025
Tesla signs $16.5 billion chip contract with Samsung Electronics
• The Samsung-Tesla deal comes at a sensitive time that the Trump administration’s stated intention of imposing 25% tariffs. This new contract may trigger a recovery in its foundry business’ 2-nanometer generation chip production and boost the company’s foundry sales by 10% annually.
Sandisk forms Technical Advisory Board to guide development and strategy for high-bandwidth flash memory technology
• High-bandwidth flash (HBF) is set to revolutionize edge AI by equipping devices with memory capacity and bandwidth capabilities that will support sophisticated models running locally in real time, this advancement will unlock a new era of intelligent edge applications, fundamentally changing how and where AI inference is performed.
Kioxia unveils LC9 series up to 245.76TB PCIe 5.0 NVMe 2.5-Inch and EDSFF E3.L form factor SSD
• This new capacity and form factor option is purpose-built for the performance and efficiency demands of GenAI environments. GenAI places unique demands on storage, including the need to store vast datasets for training large language models (LLMs), and to create embeddings and vector databases that support inference through retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These workloads require storage solutions with exceptional capacity, speed, and efficiency.
SK Hynix reports a 68% record jump in profit as demand for AI chips soars
• As a key supplier to AI giant Nvidia, the company is on track to double HBM chip sales for the full year, and new model launches by customers would drive high-end AI chip demand growth.
Micron starts to ship samples of HBM4 memory to key clients
• The new memory assemblies for next-generation AI and HPC processors feature a 36 GB capacity and offer bandwidth of 2 TB/s
• The samples rely on 24GB DRAM devices made on the company's 1ß (1-beta) DRAM process technology as well as logic base dies produced by TSMC using its 12FFC+ (2nm-class) or N5 (5nm-class) logic process technology.
• It is expected that Nvidia's codenamed Vera Rubin GPUs for datacenters will be among the first products to adopt HBM4 in late 2026.
SUPPLY TREND
2024-2025 Worldwide SSD Shipment
SSD is entering its seasonal demand lull. Influenced by North American inventory and China’s stern approach towards smuggling of imported memory products, Q3 flash shipments have dropped to the lowest level of 2025
2024-2025 Worldwide DRAM Output
2024-2025 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
Flash Sufficiency: maintain at low level since 2024.
Price Trend: NAND flash price had a slight bound in 2025/B and is expected to maintain at an average level throughout 2025 as chip makers’ plan of production cut continues, despite the general demand isn’t significantly strong and some inventory exist.
2024-2025 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: almost maintain at extreme low level in 2025 except a slight expansion in Q1’25 to fulfill surging demand under price uptrend.
Price Trend: 8Gb spot price has risen sharply and is projected to meet contract price level in Q3’25 considering consistent production cut on DDR4.
Insights
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How to Choose Industrial SSD for Medical Devices?
Medical devices are rapidly becoming more digital. From medical imaging systems, patient monitoring devices, endoscopy systems, and automated dispensing cabinets to healthcare edge gateways, an increasing number of healthcare applications must continuously record medical images, sensor data, operation logs, alarm events, and system status while supporting diagnostic and treatment workflows.
What Is an NVMe SSD?
Learn what an NVMe SSD is, how NVMe differs from SATA SSDs, and why NVMe storage is ideal for automation, industrial systems, and high-frequency data logging.
What Is ECC DRAM?
Learn what ECC DRAM is, how error correction works, and why it matters for data integrity, system stability, networking security, and mission-critical computing.
How to Choose NVR Storage: Key Factors for Efficient Surveillance Systems
NVR storage is not only about capacity planning. It also affects data integrity and long-term system reliability. For AI NVR and 24/7 recording environments, storage devices must handle heavy write workloads, RAID rebuilding, and continuous recording. As a result, choosing between HDD vs. SSD and selecting the right surveillance SSD have become critical for modern surveillance deployment.
What Is the SSD Temperature Range?
Temperature is the silent limiter of every SSD, and the SSD temperature range is both a performance spec as well as a reliability spec. Under sustained load, NVMe firmware tracks a composite temperature and will start to throttle lightly or heavily. So, write throughput drops hard and latency spikes. Heat also speeds charge leakage inside NAND, which accelerates retention loss. The effect worsens as cells age from program/erase wear. Thus, you burn endurance faster and raise data-retention trouble when the drive later remains unpowered.
Garbage Collection in Industrial SSDs: What You Need to Know
Garbage collection in SSDs is the controller's quiet cleanup job. It compacts still-valid pages into new space and erases blocks that are now mostly junk. That might sound weird until you remember NAND flash can't overwrite a programmed page. It must erase first, and erase happens at the block level, not per page. So, updates become "write elsewhere, then clean later."
