Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
February 2026
Samsung & Intel develop SmartPower HDR for OLED laptops
• This technological innovation delivers up to 22% power savings through dynamic voltage control, reducing energy consumption while maintaining full panel brightness, enabling longer battery life and improves efficiency in next-generation OLED devices.
Kioxia highlights versatile memory and SSD solutions for AI, mobile, automotive, and data centers
• In CES 2026, Kioxia showcased products enabling fast, large-scale data processing with reliability and scalability for data centers, storage tailored to autonomous driving and connected vehicles. While in mobile, compact and energy-efficient memory for smartphones and portable electronics were stressed on, reinforced its vision of enabling next-generation digital experiences across multiple industries through innovation in memory and storage.
SanDisk AI‑driven storage upside: stock price jumps by 1,500% in almost a year
• AI data centers, hyperscalers, and enterprise customers are the primary growth engines, with revenue from AI‑related and semi‑custom clients rising 76% year over year. Besides, the firm’s industrial and automotive storage revenue grew 63%, showing that demand strength extends beyond pure AI infrastructure.
SK hynix showcases next-gen AI memory innovation in CES 2026
• The next‑gen. products designed for data centers, AI servers, and on‑device AI include 16‑layer 48GB HBM4 for the first time, and 12‑layer 36GB HBM3E which is expected to be the main HBM volume driver in 2026.In NAND flash, the company introduced a 321‑layer 2Tb QLC NAND targeting ultra‑high‑capacity enterprise SSDs for AI data centers, emphasizing improved performance and energy efficiency.
Micron to build $100B New York DRAM megafab
• The site is projected to produce up to 40% of Micron’s total DRAM output in the U.S. by the 2040s, marking a landmark investment in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, strengthening domestic supply chains, and underscores Micron’s long-term strategy to expand DRAM production capacity and meet growing global demand.
SUPPLY TREND
2025 – 2026 Worldwide NAND Flash Output
Driven by AI and datacenter growth, NAND flash demand has shifted sharply toward high-capacity enterprise SSDs, prompting a steady rise in 3D NAND output and a decline in Planar NAND—signaling a structural transition in supply to meet evolving market needs.
2025-2026 Worldwide DRAM Output
2025-2026 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
Flash Sufficiency: CSP-driven AI expansion caused severe NAND shortages starting from Q3’25, and this might last during the entire 2026 1H.
Price Trend: Overall NAND flash price rose sharply in Q4’25 with enterprise and cloud service provider (CSP) demand surging—driven by AI infrastructure expansion and server upgrades. The market condition is projected to continue in 2026, sustaining NAND flash prices at a high level.
2025-2026 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: Supply has come under significant pressure since Q2’25, as manufacturers phase out DDR4 production and reallocate capacity toward high-demand applications from the CSPs. This shift has led to a pronounced tightening in overall DRAM availability.
Price Trend: The spot price begins to diverge upward from contract pricing starting from late 2025, reflecting the continuous shortage in more of spot and channel markets.
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."
