How AI’s insatiable appetite for data storage is significantly increasing memory costs, and it’s only going to get worse.
The doom-mongers have long warned that AI would be coming to take our jobs. But it turns out it’s taking our memory instead.
Not the sentimental kind. Not the Andrew Lloyd Webber kind. Although if you’ve ever sat through Cats, you’ll know that particular memory is harder to shift than melted chocolate from a white shirt two minutes before a meeting.
No, we’re talking about the actual, physical, silicon and circuitry kind of memory, the so-called NAND flash that goes into every SD card, smartphone, and laptop your business depends on.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that SD cards, those tiny plastic rectangles you lose within the cavernous expanse of a laptop bag, would be immune to the great upheavals of our time. War, pestilence, the rise of the orange terror. Surely the humble 256GB SanDisk card would endure, quietly affordable, stacked in a Perspex tub at your local Currys.
But you’d be wrong.
The bit where AI begins to irritate you. Again.
Here’s what’s happened. The AI boom has developed a voracious appetite for memory. Not just the NAND flash in your SD cards, but every type of memory the technology industry produces. So, DRAM, NAND, and the real villain of the piece, HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), the specialist chips that AI processors from Nvidia and AMD depend on.
Already, here in 2026, AI data centres consume roughly 70% of all global memory production.
Say, what?
Yep, you read that right. Seven out of every ten memory chips rolling off the production line are headed for a server farm, not your laptop, your phone, or your camera.
Key manufacturers like Samsung are actively reallocating their fabrication capacity away from consumer memory toward HBM and enterprise components, because AI customers pay substantially more. AI isn’t taking our jobs, it’s hoovering up the components we need to do them.
The numbers are stark. According to a TrendForce analysis in February 2026, NAND flash prices are up 60% quarter on quarter, and DRAM is up a staggering 95% in Q1 2026 alone.
Seagate has described the current pricing as “the new normal” with many in the industry suggesting the shortage could persist for a decade. New fabrication facilities take years to build, and governments and enterprises alike are now rushing to buy hardware before prices climb further, which, of course, simply accelerates the problem.
The gathering storm
It was in February that I first became acquainted with the problem.
Like Galadriel’s warnings at the commencement of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, a faint rumour had been growing, and a teeny niggle had begun to enter my subconscious. Whispers of a nameless fear among the tech press. Something about memory and data centres and supply chains. I noted it vaguely, awarding it all the serious alarm that I would an amber weather warning.
But then, a few weeks ago, having invested in a new additional Canon Cinema camera for our new corporate videography service (shameless plug), I needed a couple of new SD cards. Nothing exotic. The same V60 UHS-II cards I’d been buying for years. Like most casual IT purchasers on the planet, I turned to Amazon.
At first, I thought there’d been a glitch, or I’d simply made a mistake. An SD card we’d purchased for £49 last summer was now £99. Surely that can’t be right, I mused. A 100% increase in barely six months? But it was correct. And no deals were to be had elsewhere. Cards had either doubled in cost or were simply out of stock. I therefore, somewhat grudgingly, bought two.
But that is not where our tale ends. For never was a story of more woe than this of SD cards and their price vertigo. Yesterday, I wondered whether it might be prudent to invest in a couple more. To my alarm, and I don’t use the term lightly, the cost had risen from £99 to £249. The same card. The same listing.
A 150% increase in two weeks. Ouch.
Now multiply that across every business in the country buying storage, RAM, phones, laptops, and servers. Remember, this isn’t just a NAND flash problem. The DRAM in your office PCs and the memory in your phones are all caught in the same squeeze.
What businesses should actually be doing
We’d make two simple suggestions.
Budget for higher storage costs
If you’re planning any kind of new digital hardware investment, factor in that it will cost meaningfully more than it did eighteen months ago.
Don’t defer hardware upgrades indefinitely
It’s tempting to wait for prices to drop but it seems most likely that relief is unlikely before late 2027 at the earliest, and even that assumes new manufacturing capacity comes online as planned. Waiting could simply mean paying more later.
The bigger picture
There’s something faintly absurd about a shortage of tiny memory cards being driven by the same technology that’s supposed to be revolutionising human civilisation. The machines are getting smarter, and the first casualty is the price of a SanDisk Extreme Pro. It’s not quite the dystopia anyone predicted, but it is expensive.
For businesses, the lesson is clear. The AI revolution isn’t just happening in chatbots and boardroom slide decks. It’s reshaping supply chains, component costs, and the economics of everyday technology. Ignoring it won’t make it go away, and pretending your next hardware purchase will cost the same as your last one is wishful thinking.
So no, AI hasn’t taken our jobs. It’s done something arguably more annoying, it’s made the tools we need to do them cost twice as much. Somewhere, a solitary cat on a West End stage is singing about the beauty of remembering. The rest of us are just trying to afford a 512GB V90.
As for Katatomic, we’ll be here, building websites, shooting video, and saving up to invest in a new safe to protect our increasingly valuable collection of SD cards.
If you’d like to find out more about our founding member rates for corporate videography, learn more at our new videography website. We promise not to talk about NAND flash supply chains the entire time.
Katatomic is a web development and corporate videography agency based in Staffordshire. We’ve been building websites since 2000 and have recently expanded into professional video production using Canon Cinema cameras. We also offer AI consultancy for businesses that want to understand what all the fuss is about without the jargon.