Kioxia’s memory is “sold out” for 2026, prolonging a “high-end and expensive phase”

The companies that make RAM and flash memory chips are enjoying record profits because of the AI-induced memory crunch—and they’re also indicating that they don’t expect conditions to improve much if at all in 2026. And while RAM kits have been hit the fastest and hardest by shortages and price increases, we shouldn’t expect SSD pricing to improve any time soon, either.

That’s the message from Shunsuke Nakato (via PC Gamer), managing director of the memory division of Kioxia, the Japanese memory company that was spun off from Toshiba at the end of the 2010s. Nakato says that Kioxia’s manufacturing capacity is sold out through the rest of 2026, driving the market for both enterprise and consumer SSDs to a “high-end and expensive phase.”

“There is a sense of crisis that companies will be eliminated the moment they stop investing in AI, so they have no choice but to continue investing,” said Nakato, as reported by the Korean-language publication Digital Daily. Absent a big change in the demand for generative AI data centers, that cycle of investments will keep prices high for the foreseeable future.

Nakato did note that Kioxia was attempting to increase its manufacturing capacity to meet the elevated demand, saying that it was taking steps to improve yields at its factory in Yokkaichi and that Kioxia expected another factory in Kitakami to begin “full-scale mass production” this year.

As we’ve seen during several chip shortages this decade, it takes time for chip shortages to abate because it takes years to build new factories and get them producing useful numbers of usable chips. Companies are also sometimes cautious about adding new capacity too quickly, lest market conditions change in the interim and leave them with piles of expensive memory that they have to discount heavily to sell.