Samsung, Yangtze River storage and other chip giants collective price increases of more than 10%, 2025 global chip storage market or growth will slow down
Recently, the memory chip market once again ushered in a "tide of price increases", but the overall scale growth has shown signs of slowing down.
On March 17, titanium media silicon-based world exclusively reported that memory chip manufacturer Micron announced an increase in the price of its NAND flash memory, with a price increase of more than 10%. At the same time, SanDisk (SanDisk), Samsung and SK Hynix also follow the market sentiment, is expected to adjust the price of NAND flash memory next month, Sandisk chip rose by 10%.Not only overseas manufacturers, domestic memory chip companies have also begun to follow. Titanium media silicon-based world learned from the industrial chain that Yangtze River Storage's brand "State" will also raise delivery prices in April this year, and the price increase will exceed 10%.
A chip industry source told the titanium media silicon-based world that the recent shortage of memory chip production, the delivery cycle has become longer, and the downstream part of NAND flash memory has reached three times the original price, and the main reason for the rise is that Micron and Samsung and other overseas manufacturers have cut production, and the industry supply has reduced prices. According to Electronic Times, the NAND capacity of the five original factories has shrunk by 35%.
From the perspective of the whole year, the memory chip market will have a cyclical trend of price rise and volume fall, and the scale may slow down.CFM flash market data show that driven by strong demand for AI servers, in 2024, global DRAM and NAND flash sales revenue hit a record high of $167 billion, up 85.53% from the previous year, but in the fourth quarter of last year, the global NAND flash scale decreased by 8.5% to $17.41 billion. In 2025, the global storage market is expected to achieve only a slight growth of 2%.
In the beginning of 2025, DeepSeek reignited a new boom in the development of the AI large model industry.Omdia's latest report shows that in 2023, the global generative AI market will account for 9% of the total AI market, reaching $6.8 billion; By 2024, the generative AI market is expected to more than double to $14.6 billion. It is expected that by 2029, the generative AI market will account for one-third of the total, or about $7.3 billion, with a five-year compound growth rate of 38%, and a broad market prospect.IDC believes that in 2025, the landing of generative AI in enterprises will still prioritize productivity enhancement scenarios such as office assistants, followed by industry vertical business scenarios. Finance, energy, retail, manufacturing are the most noteworthy traditional industries. From another perspective, agents will be an important direction for the application of large models. The large model has increased the demand and scarcity of AI computing power, and large manufacturers such as Meta and Amazon have purchased a large number of Nvidia GPU cards. At the same time, under the gradual failure of "Moore's Law", the market demand for AI reasoning computing power, as well as data center storage and network has also increased significantly.
Take DeepSeek, for example. Currently, 40-60% of Deepseek's components are implemented through SSD storage products, which are part of the infrastructure, which also highlights the important role DRAM and HBM play in this. Therefore, for the memory chip industry with a long cycle, AI will become a new "savior" in this field under the decreasing demand of the current consumer market.
It is expected that in 2025, with the mass production of HBM4 by Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix and other companies, HBM products will account for nearly 30% of the total DRAM industry, and the market will reach 288 billion Gb equivalent, and its application continues to grow in terms of server memory consumption.The rapid development of emerging technologies such as AI, big data, and the Internet of Things will continue to drive storage demand growth. Secondly, the continuous emergence of new storage products, in the field of data center, low-power operation has become more and more important, the emergence of new technologies based on LPDDR, bringing more choices and competition to the market; Finally, the AI boom provides a broad market space for the storage industry, but it also puts forward higher requirements for manufacturers' technological innovation ability, product performance and cost control ability.
Tai Wei took DeepSeek as an example, "Open source and lower cost AI solutions are full of imagination, and the sales of integrated DS machines have driven the application of large models in the industry and the landing acceleration of the end side, and the built-in DS may really become a selling point in the mouth of a salesman."In terms of price, with increased demand, improved technology and reduced production capacity investment, storage product prices are expected to achieve an overall recovery in the third quarter of this year.
According to statistics, as of the end of the first quarter of 2025, the storage inventory will generally be maintained at the level of about 12 to 16 weeks, and the terminal manufacturer inventory is expected to fall to 8-10 weeks, which is the normal range, and it is expected that by the third quarter of 2025, under the tight supply and demand, the storage price may achieve a full rise.
