South Korean media have recently reported that Samsung Electronics intends to raise the contract price of NAND flash memory by approximately 100% in the first quarter of 2026. This news has quickly attracted attention across the storage industry chain. Over the past decade-plus of NAND market cycles, even during periods of rapid recovery, quarterly contract price increases have typically ranged between 20% and 40%. A 100% hike is highly unusual, occurring only in scenarios of extreme supply disruptions or structural shortages. Therefore, this development transcends the scope of a “normal cyclical rebound” .
Source and Credibility of the News
The news first emerged from multiple South Korean local media outlets, including ETNews. Given Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix’s core positions in the global storage industry, South Korean media have long maintained close information channels with upstream wafer fabs, equipment manufacturers, and module enterprises. Looking back, multiple inflection points in NAND and DRAM prices have historically been first disclosed by South Korean media before being gradually verified by market data and financial reports.
Notably, this report is not an isolated incident. Almost simultaneously, the market has observed clear upward momentum in DRAM contract price negotiations, with some products mentioned to have increases approaching 70%. This indicates that the NAND price hike is not an occasional occurrence for a single product line, but rather part of a broader initiative by storage manufacturers to restructure pricing systems amid improved overall supply and demand conditions.
From the perspective of industry chain feedback, downstream OEMs and module manufacturers have not explicitly denied the rumors; instead, they generally view it as a “not entirely unexpected” outcome. This reaction itself has, to a certain extent, enhanced the credibility of the news.
Sustained Price Hike Driven by Dual Impetuses
On the demand side, unlike previous cycles primarily driven by smartphones and PCs, the core driver behind this NAND price surge is the “super incremental” storage demand spurred by the AI industry boom. AI training and inference servers have far higher requirements for storage capacity and speed than traditional servers: a single AI training server requires 5-8 times the storage capacity of a traditional server, and primarily relies on enterprise-grade SSDs (eSSDs), especially high-performance TLC/QLC enterprise-grade SSDs. According to TrendForce data, in the third quarter of 2025, driven by the expansion of AI infrastructure by cloud service providers (CSPs), the combined revenue of the top five NAND brands increased by 16.5% quarter-on-quarter to nearly 17.1 billion US dollars, with enterprise-grade SSDs contributing the majority of the revenue growth.
The demand for storage from AI servers is not merely a quantitative increase, but is reflected in multiple dimensions such as per-machine capacity, stability, and continuous procurement capabilities. Compared to consumer devices, data center customers focus more on long-term supply capacity and overall system reliability, and are relatively less price-sensitive. This shift in demand structure has transformed NAND from a commodity whose shipments can be quickly stimulated through price cuts into a strategic foundational component. Against this backdrop, leading manufacturers like Samsung have stronger incentives to reshape market expectations by raising contract prices, rather than continuing to prioritize shipment volume as the sole goal.
On the supply side, the storage industry suffered sustained losses in 2023-2024, prompting Samsung, SK Hynix, and other manufacturers to significantly reduce capital expenditures. As a result, global NAND manufacturers have exercised extreme restraint in capital expenditures and capacity expansion over the past few quarters, with the industry as a whole shifting to a strategy of “controlling supply and prioritizing profit recovery.” There are no plans for large-scale NAND wafer capacity expansion globally in 2026. Samsung’s planned NAND wafer shipments for 2026 are set to decrease from 4.9 million units in 2025 to 4.68 million units, while SK Hynix’s will drop from 1.9 million units to 1.7 million units. Together, the two companies will reduce production by 420,000 units, accounting for 6.2% of their total 2025 shipments. Furthermore, structural capacity reallocation has further squeezed supply. Leading manufacturers such as Samsung and SK Hynix have redirected 53% of their storage capacity to higher-margin HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and enterprise-grade storage for AI servers, resulting in a more than 20% reduction in consumer-grade NAND capacity compared to 2025.
Additionally, the construction cycle for semiconductor capacity spans 2-3 years. Even if manufacturers initiate capacity expansion now, new supply will not be available until mid-2027 at the earliest, meaning the global NAND supply gap will persist throughout 2026. Some analysts predict that new NAND capacity may not come online until early 2028, indicating that the high-price environment could last for more than two years.
Combining factors of supply contraction and demand upgrading, it is evident that the current NAND market is experiencing not merely a cyclical rebound, but rather a shift in pricing logic. For manufacturers that endured the previous deep downcycle, avoiding a return to low-price competition has become a consensus. In this context, Samsung’s reported 100% price hike plan is less an aggressive move and more an “anchoring behavior” to test market tolerance. Its true significance may not lie in whether the final transaction price fully reaches this level, but in setting a price expectation for the entire NAND market that is significantly higher than in previous cycles.
Will the Price Hike Succeed?
The highly monopolistic structure of the global NAND market provides a foundation for collective price hikes by leading manufacturers. Data shows that as of early 2026, the combined market share of the top five NAND manufacturers (CR5) exceeds 92%, with Samsung ranking first with a 32%-33% share and SK Hynix second with 19%-20%. Together, the two companies control over 50% of global NAND capacity and dominate the high-end enterprise-grade and AI server NAND markets. Leveraging their technological leadership (such as Samsung’s 321L 3D NAND process and SK Hynix’s 3D stacking technology) and economies of scale, the two manufacturers possess strong bargaining power. Once they take the lead in raising prices, smaller manufacturers have no choice but to follow suit, creating a “resonance effect” of industry-wide price increases. Coupled with the aforementioned supply and demand drivers, the likelihood of the price hike being implemented is relatively high.
Future Outlook
Based on current industry dynamics and institutional forecasts, the NAND price hike cycle is expected to continue at least until the second quarter of 2026, with a full-year upward trend widely anticipated by the market. In the short term, Counterpoint predicts a 20% NAND price increase in Q2 2026, a significant slowdown from Q1’s 100% but still at a high level. Citigroup is more optimistic, projecting a 74% increase in the average selling price (ASP) of NAND in 2026, far exceeding its previous forecast of 44%. In the long term, the 2026 NAND price trend will exhibit a “high first, then low” pattern—prices will remain elevated in the first half supported by the supply-demand gap, and growth will moderate in the second half as some mature capacity comes online. However, the full-year average price will still be significantly higher than in 2025.
From a product structure perspective, enterprise-grade NAND will see sustained higher growth than consumer-grade NAND. With AI server demand still in a boom phase, the supply gap for enterprise-grade SSDs is larger. SanDisk has announced that starting from March 2026, it will raise enterprise-grade NAND prices by nearly 100% quarter-on-quarter, with some products seeing increases as high as 200%. It also requires customers to sign long-term contracts with full cash prepayment, an unprecedented move in the industry.
