SanDisk is preparing to sharply increase prices for its high-capacity 3D NAND memory used in enterprise solid-state drives, as suppliers anticipate sustained demand growth from data centers and AI infrastructure, according to a new analyst report.
Research firm Nomura Securities reports that SanDisk’s enterprise-grade NAND pricing could rise by more than 100 percent quarter over quarter during the March period. The move reflects tightening supply conditions and growing confidence among memory vendors that demand for server-class storage will accelerate in the months ahead.
In a note to clients, Nomura said its industry checks show multiple memory suppliers continuing to push prices upward, with the steepest increases concentrated in enterprise NAND products rather than consumer-grade flash.
Nomura: Sandisk could raise enterprise SSD NAND prices by more than 100% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) in Q1.$SNDK pic.twitter.com/XHG3q8mIsn
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While it remains unclear how directly the price hike will affect NAND used in smartphones and PCs, analysts note that enterprise and client NAND are often produced at the same fabrication facilities, meaning downstream effects are likely over time.
Nomura attributes the pricing momentum to a combination of near-term supply constraints and medium-term demand growth driven by artificial intelligence workloads. As AI systems expand, so does the need for fast, high-capacity storage to support training, inference, and data-intensive operations.
Among the demand drivers cited is Nvidia’s Inference Context Memory Storage Platform (ICMSP), which is built around the BlueField-4 DPU. Each BlueField-4 unit integrates a 512 GB solid-state drive used for key-value cache storage. In Nvidia’s VR NVL144 rack design, every compute tray includes one such DPU, resulting in 18 DPUs and approximately 9.2 terabytes of 3D NAND per rack.
Based on Nomura’s estimates, if Nvidia were to ship around 50,000 VR NVL144 racks annually, total NAND consumption for that platform alone would approach 0.44 exabytes. Additional demand is expected from partners offering their own versions of VR NVL144 systems as part of Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform.
Even so, analysts caution that no single platform can fully account for the sudden doubling of NAND prices. The global memory industry produces more than 800 exabytes of NAND each year, making it unlikely that one product line could disrupt supply on its own. Moreover, storage configurations for Rubin-based systems beyond Nvidia’s reference designs have yet to be disclosed, limiting precise demand forecasts.
Despite those uncertainties, the broader trend is clear. As AI deployments scale across cloud providers, enterprises, and research institutions, storage requirements are expanding rapidly. Once that demand begins to outpace available supply, price increases become inevitable—a dynamic that, according to Nomura, is now playing out in the enterprise NAND market.
