The semiconductor industry is desperate to feed the AI industry machine today, and with RAM being the key component in the massive AI datacenter expansion efforts, it has become the first victim of the shortage happening within the consumer electronics sector, causing severe price spikes across the board. The same could happen to SSDs, if the idea of “AI SSD” designed for AI uses manage to take off, as per Chosun Biz.
AI SSDs Will Open Up AI Companies’ Appetite
The idea of so-called “AI SSDs” are simply faster SSDs. They have to be extremely fast to keep up with inferencing workloads, which is especially resource-intensive; specifically, SK Hynix, the primary developer of this solution alongside NVIDIA (codenamed “Storage Next” or “AI-N P”), will be targeting a 10-fold increase in performance with random I/O performance upwards of 100 million input/output operations per second (IOPS). For reference, top-tier PCIe 5.0 SSDs today only achieve 2 million IOPS, while present-day datacenter SSDs are inching close to 10 million IOPS.
The critical factor that will induce another industry-wide shortage is the viability of such designs on future AI datacenters. Currently, the focus is on massive amounts of RAM (and VRAM) as that is the primary ingredient for training workloads, but the name of the game is shifting to inferencing, which HBM memory is struggling to cope. A non-volatile storage medium that is fast enough, like Storage Next, offering significantly larger storage pool will be a hot commodity among AI companies to keep increasing their AI’s capabilities.
Should that happen, expect all the production capacity to be scooped up by said companies, leaving little to none for the general consumer market to work with – which means whatever you witnessed on the RAM markets today will be replicated on the NAND/SSD markets. We’ve already seen small surges in SSD pricing in the recent weeks, and with the extraordinary measures AI companies are using to snatch every compute resource available, don’t expect this to get better anytime soon.
Pokdepinion: It’s a really bad time for the consumer tech industry.
![[UPDATED: Statements] Forza Horizon 6 Dev Drops Multi-Millennial Ban Hammer To Cheater Before The Game Has Even Released - 58](https://cdn.pokde.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/12022254/fh6leakpermabancover-420x280.jpg "[UPDATED: Statements] Forza Horizon 6 Dev Drops Multi-Millennial Ban Hammer To Cheater Before The Game Has Even Released - 59")
