Black Friday to the rescue? SSD prices could rise again, so now is the time to buy (www.techradar.com)

NAND flash memory prices have surged sharply over the past six months as AI-related demand drives data centers to replace hard drives with SSDs, and that trend looks set to push consumer SSD prices higher into 2026 and possibly beyond. Industry signals include Phison CEO Khein‑Seng Pua’s claim that NAND pricing doubled in six months, TLC 1‑terabit NAND jumping from $4.80 to $10.70 per chip, SanDisk raising NAND prices ~50% in November, and Phison reporting a 30% YoY revenue rise in Q3 2025 (largely tied to increased SSD controller demand). These moves reflect tighter NAND supply and stronger enterprise procurement tied to large-scale AI storage needs. For the AI/ML community this matters because storage is a core cost and bottleneck for training and inference pipelines: higher NAND prices raise the bill for on‑prem servers, SSD-equipped cache/Tier‑1 storage, and even edge devices, and could change strategies around tiered storage, dataset curation, and cloud vs. local tradeoffs. For consumers and smaller teams, the near-term implication is practical—Black Friday and current holiday sales may be the last window to buy SSD capacity at relatively low prices before broader market-driven increases take hold.