If you've noticed solid-state drives getting harder to find or more expensive, the culprit may be the AI boom — and according to a top executive at one of the chip industry's key players, relief isn't coming anytime soon.
Nelson Duann, Senior Vice President at Silicon Motion — a company that makes the controller chips that sit inside SSDs — told Tom's Hardware that the NAND flash memory market is already in a severe shortage, and conditions are expected to get significantly worse by 2027. The core problem: AI data centers are consuming an enormous and growing share of NAND supply, leaving consumer storage products competing for scraps.
NAND flash is the underlying technology inside virtually every modern SSD, from the drive in your laptop to the storage arrays powering cloud services. When demand for NAND surges in one sector, the ripple effects are felt across the entire market.
On a more forward-looking note, Duann said Silicon Motion does have a next-generation PCIe 6.0 SSD controller for consumer drives in the pipeline, expected to arrive next year. PCIe 6.0 promises dramatically faster data transfer speeds compared to today's common PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 drives. But faster controllers won't mean much if the NAND chips to fill those drives remain scarce.
The story matters because it signals that the infrastructure hunger of the AI industry isn't just an abstract supply-chain issue — it's already beginning to affect the everyday technology that consumers buy, and the squeeze could tighten considerably over the next two years.