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A petabyte in a single drive has been the storage industry’s next round number for a while. As of this summer, enough of it is on the public record to reconstruct. At FMS 2026, Kioxia and Sandisk unveiled their 10th-generation QLC 3D flash memory: 332 layers, more than 37 Gb/mm², and up to 60% denser…
Read MoreMemory and storage spent most of July moving in opposite directions, an unusual split in this cycle. In the final week, NAND reversed and joined DRAM on the way up. TrendForce’s DDR4 8Gb spot benchmark rose from $36.00 on June 30 to $42.08 on July 28, an increase of 16.9%. Its 512Gb TLC NAND benchmark…
Read MoreTL;DR: Korea’s June 29 plan puts over $550B toward new memory fabs — a slice of a much larger $3.1T multi-decade Samsung/SK spending plan. Most new capacity targets high-margin server DRAM and HBM, not everyday PC/laptop memory. Micron is running its own parallel expansion; China’s CXMT is growing fast but not yet server/HBM-ready. Real relief…
Read MoreOn June 15, AMD announced it had acquired MEXT, a small software company with an unusual pitch: make cheap NAND flash look like DRAM to the operating system, so a server can run with far less of the expensive stuff. Terms weren’t disclosed, and AMD picked up MEXT’s engineering team along with the technology. For…
Read MoreIn early June, a single analyst note briefly knocked the memory trade off balance. Barron’s reported that Karl Ackerman expects DRAM and NAND average selling prices (ASPs) to peak in mid-2026 and begin falling quarter over quarter as early as 2027 — roughly a year ahead of his own earlier forecast. Micron’s stock fell on…
Read MoreWhile the AI super-cycle keeps DRAM, HBM, and 3D TLC NAND in the headlines, a quieter — and arguably more violent — squeeze is unfolding in the corner of the memory market that almost nobody outside of embedded design houses talks about: planar 2D NAND, especially MLC and SLC. Prices on some part numbers are…
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