Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
September 2025
U.S. government considers annual permits for Samsung and SK hynix to supply equipment to their Chinese fabs
• The decision will add significant regulatory complexity, but will at least maintain continuity for fab operations without enabling upgrades or expansions that could boost China's access to advanced chip technology. This approach helps avoid disruption to the highly-volatile global supply of DRAM and NAND memory.
Sandisk unveils ultraQLC technology platform with up to 256TB enterprise SSD capacity
• With a combination of BiCS8 QLC CBA NAND, the platform is designed for AI-driven, data-intensive workloads like data ingest, preparation, and fast AI data lakes with high-performance speeds and power efficiency, while improving TCO for high-capacity applications in hyperscale cloud.
Kioxia successful prototyping of 5TB large-capacity and 64GB/s high-bandwidth flash memory module
• The company has developed a new module configuration utilizing daisy-chained connections with beads of flash memories to address the trade-off between capacity and bandwidth that has been a challenge with DRAM-based conventional memory modules
• The high-speed transceiver technology enabling bandwidths of 128Gb/s and techniques to enhance flash memory performance are also under development
• Kioxia is promoting the early commercialization and practical implementation of the findings, exploiting new market trends such as GenAI
U.S. government considers annual permits for Samsung and SK hynix to supply equipment to their Chinese fabs
• The decision will add significant regulatory complexity, but will at least maintain continuity for fab operations without enabling upgrades or expansions that could boost China's access to advanced chip technology. This approach helps avoid disruption to the highly-volatile global supply of DRAM and NAND memory.
Micron launches space-qualified portfolio to power mission-critical data for aerospace innovation
• With a die capacity of 256Gb, this product is the first in a portfolio that will include space-qualified NAND, NOR and DRAM solutions
• The company recently announced plans to strengthen its U.S.-based manufacturing, including expanding its portfolio of NOR, SLC NAND, and DDR3, as well as ensuring the longevity supply of DDR4 and LPDDR4 for critical applications such as aerospace. The initiative is aimed at providing end-to-end supply chain control—essential for the aerospace and government sectors in terms of quality, longevity, security, traceability, and supply continuity.
SUPPLY TREND
2024-2025 Worldwide SSD Shipment
WW SSD demand recovers from relatively lower level in Q2, and is expected to stay at a higher level than current stage in 2026
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 rebound in 2025/B. With enterprise and cloud service provider (CSP) demand surging—driven by AI infrastructure expansion and server upgrades—the overall flash price is expected to increase by at least 10% in Q4.
2024-2025 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: Supply remains at an extremely low level throughout 2025, with only a slight expansion expected in Q1’26. However, this increase is still insufficient to meet overall market demand.
Price Trend: DDR4 prices remain high due to ongoing production cuts. Strong demand from CSPs and enterprise servers has tightened DDR5 supply, with manufacturers prioritizing DDR5 and HBM, driving prices up through Q4.
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."
