GoKawiilThe memory chip that makes a router remember how to be a router is a world away from the sleek GPUs that are attracting eye-popping investments and alarming valuations, as well as sending stock markets shooting upwards. They’re small, historically have been cheap, and are based on technology that has been around for years.
But despite being a world away from GPUs, the price of these often overlooked chips is skyrocketing, thanks to the all-encompassing memory price crisis caused by the AI boom.
While public and press attention has focused on the expensive chips, there’s an equally large impact beginning to be felt on older, less attractive memory chips. HBM is vital for AI accelerators, while DRAM and high-capacity NAND are being swallowed up by rapidly expanding data centres. A June report from Morgan Stanley reckons memory prices have risen more than sixfold over the last year, breaking with decades in which memory became steadily cheaper as production increased.
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It’s not just HBM and DRAM that’s being affected. The crunch is also spreading down into much older forms of memory, including NOR flash and single-level cell, or SLC, NAND . Morgan Stanley expects NOR flash to remain undersupplied through 2026, while JPMorgan has warned its forecasts don’t fully capture a potential supply crunch in SLC NAND. The effects are already showing up in prices. TrendForce says contract prices for both NOR flash and SLC NAND rose by more than 100% during the first half of 2026 , while it expects SLC NAND prices to rise another 120% to 170% in the second half of the year compared with the first half .
Picking winners
An increase in prices will have an impact on the tech we use day in, day out. NOR flash is commonly used to store boot and program code, and is a core part of automotive, industrial, and networking equipment . SLC NAND is deployed across a number of uses because of its reliability and endurance when placed in embedded hardware with long lifespans.
Both are vital. And both are being overlooked in favour of higher-margin chips — pushing the supply crunch to tech that previously never faced any issues. “The SLC NAND market is probably under a billion dollars a year,” said Jim Handy, a semiconductor and SSD analyst at Objective Analysis, in an interview with Tom’s Hardware Premium. That tiny scale adds up to a big problem, because it disincentivises any new investment.
“What you've got going on is a purely economic phenomenon,” said Handy. Hyperscalers and cloud providers are “all trying to outspend each other”, pouring unprecedented sums into semiconductors to build AI infrastructure. That willingness to spend big means the most profitable customers naturally move to the front of the queue.
Companies including Nvidia, Broadcom and Marvell need huge amounts of semiconductor manufacturing capacity for chips destined for AI systems. “They’re sucking up all of the wafers,” says Handy. “And then the companies who make NOR flash and SLC are having a hard time getting wafers to build their product, and so they have to raise prices.”
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