Sandisk held its 2026 Investor Day, outlining its NAND technology roadmap, highly optimized financial model, and enduring customer partnerships, all aimed at driving sustainable long-term value in the AI era.

According to South Korean media, driven by the surging demand for high-bandwidth Memory (HBM) amid expanding investments in AI infrastructure, Samsung Electronics is planning to relocate part of its back-end operations for legacy Memory from its factories in Cheonan and Onyang, Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea, to Vietnam. This move aims to refocus its domestic back-end manufacturing capabilities on high-value-added products like HBM.

Original manufacturers' DDR5 supply remains in a state of shortage; however, as contract prices rise quarter by quarter, major server clients have become increasingly sensitive to Memory costs. Coupled with the signing of long-term agreements that have secured a certain level of DDR5 supply for these major clients, the price increase for DDR5 is expected to moderate.

According to Korean media citing industry sources, although Samsung's initial HBM4 yield during mass production in February of this year briefly fell below 60%, its yield has recently approached 80%, which is about four months ahead of the original year-end target of 80%.

According to media reports, NVIDIA is developing a new technology that could allow SSDs to act as additional VRAM in the future. When a graphics card runs out of VRAM, it could use data stored on a fast NVMe SSD instead, which could particularly benefit games with extremely high VRAM requirements or AI inference workloads.

Chen Pei‑Ming, President of Winbond Electronics, stated that Memory supply tightness is clear. Many customers are not satisfied with their existing long‑term agreements and wish to extend them to 2029 or even 2030, while locking in capacity from the upcoming Kaohsiung Module B new fab in advance.

The company approved a total investment of approximately 54 trillion, 35.2 trillion won in Yongin “Y2” fab and 19.1 trillion won in the Cheongju “M17” fab, in a board meeting.

FADU is advancing a business initiative to bypass Memory manufacturers and supply SSD controllers directly to server customers. The company aims to further expand its base of hyperscale clients, with Meta already secured as one of its major hyperscale customers.

Samsung Electronics showcased its latest AI Memory portfolio and technology roadmap at the 2026 Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in Santa Clara, unveiling the industry's first zHBM concept, zNAND‑O concept, and V10 BV‑NAND with over 400 layers, along with a suite of integrated solutions designed to advance future AI infrastructure.

CFM anticipates that the upward momentum for Q4 consumer-grade NAND Flash and SSD contract prices has largely exhausted. This is primarily driven by weak end-user demand undermining downstream acceptance, coupled with the accelerated adoption of QLC SSDs. In the short term, the structural contradiction between persistently high upstream costs and sluggish downstream demand is difficult to resolve quickly, leaving spot prices for embedded Memory under continued downward pressure. Against this backdrop, some Memory original manufacturers plan to flexibly adjust NAND Flash capacity deployment to achieve a dynamic balance of industry supply and demand.

Kioxia Corporation Kioxia Corporation unveiled their next-generation Quad-Level-Cell (QLC) 3D flash Memory technology, which delivers up to 60% increase in bit density compared to their 8th-generation, surpassing 37 Gb/mm² and setting the industry benchmark for bit density, performance and power efficiency.

For Memory manufacturers, the stagnation of wafer price increases and the fact that the increase in original manufacturers' contract prices is lower than market expectations are continuously disturbing and intensifying the emotional game between buyers and sellers. More severely, low-end resources that were previously common in channel SSDs, Memory cards, and USB flash drives have recently begun to penetrate the embedded eMMC market. As we get closer to the mid-to-late third quarter, Memory manufacturers will face increasing pressure on shipments and financial performance.

Driven by these demand disparities, domestic and international customers show different attitudes toward eSSD price hikes: domestic customers have limited willingness to absorb continuous price increases, while the North American market demonstrates higher acceptance due to strong demand support. Consequently, pricing increases for Q3 eSSDs have diverged among different Memory original manufacturers. CFM estimates that the overall price hikes will range from 10% to 30%.

SK hynix Inc. announced in collaboration with Sandisk that it has unveiled the first standard specifications for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a next-generation storage technology.

According to industry insiders cited by media outlets, CXMT's LPDDR6 is approaching the final stage of R&D validation, marking a critical step before mass production.