SSD "shortfall in supply appears unlikely to be alleviated for 2+ years"
Seagate, Western Digital in focus as Wedbush ups price targets amid strong demand
Copilot:
That quote refers to the SSD market, not HDD. The context is rising demand for AI-optimized enterprise storage, tight NAND supply, and strategic wafer allocation—all of which are driving SSD pricing and margins higher through 2026–2027.
Why It’s an SSD Story
- Source context: The quote aligns with analysis from Mordor Intelligence and Forbes, which highlight SSD growth driven by AI workloads, hyperscaler deployments, and NAND supply discipline.
- SSD market size: Expected to grow from $61.3B in 2025 to $129.6B by 2030, with a 16.2% CAGR, fueled by enterprise AI clusters and high-capacity QLC drives.
- NAND supply constraints: Vendors are calibrating wafer starts and layer transitions to preserve margins, creating a multi-year supply shortfall that supports pricing power.
- AI impact: SSDs are preferred for low-latency, high-throughput workloads like training and inference—especially with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and LLMs.
Why Not HDD?
- HDDs are also seeing demand growth, especially in exabyte shipments for cloud storage, but:
- Unit shipments remain flat (~123M units/year through 2030)
- Pricing is more volatile, and margins are thinner
- Manufacturers are cautious about expanding capacity due to past inventory crashes
If you’d like, I can break down how SSD vendors like Samsung, Micron, and Kioxia are managing NAND layer transitions (e.g. 238L ? 321L) to balance density and margin—or how QLC and PCIe Gen5 are reshaping enterprise SSD economics.
PS
Thingy, of every kind, Shrink n Stack bits ONLY soar from here.
ASML
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