NAND Flash shortages are expected to end in 2027, per new report

Every industry report this year has landed like bad news, so it is genuinely refreshing to see one that does not. TrendForce's latest forecast says NAND flash supply and demand should finally balance out during the second half of 2027, effectively ending the shortage that has hammered SSD prices for the past two years.

The near-term outlook, however, is still not pretty. TrendForce expects a 4% to 6% supply deficit for the rest of 2026, so NAND prices are not dropping anytime soon. The firm does point to rising wafer output from SK hynix, Micron, Samsung, and YMTC, along with process node upgrades, as the reason supply should finally catch up.

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Weaker consumer demand is also playing a role, since prices have already climbed high enough that plenty of buyers are holding off on upgrades and stretching out their current storage instead.

Compare that to what we've heard about DRAM lately, and NAND looks almost optimistic. We recently covered ADATA's chairman warning that DRAM shortages could persist for another decade, largely driven by AI infrastructure demand that shows no sign of slowing down. SK hynix's own chairman has said something similar, predicting the memory crisis could stretch out until 2030.

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Those are not outlier opinions either. We've tracked DRAM contract prices climbing as much as 89% in a single quarter, and reports that manufacturers will only meet around 60% of global DRAM demand by the end of 2027, the same year NAND is supposedly leveling off. So while NAND is finally seeing some stability, DRAM is not expected to match that pace.

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NAND has had its own decade-long warnings too. Phison's CEO said back in October that severe NAND shortages could last up to 10 years as data centers shift more of their spending toward flash-heavy inference workloads instead of training.

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TrendForce's new timeline does not erase that risk entirely, since a lot depends on AI demand staying roughly where it is and consumer demand staying weak enough to free up capacity. It is, however, the first credible date anyone in the memory industry has put on an actual recovery, which is more than DRAM buyers have gotten so far this year.

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It must be said that for gamers and PC builders, this does not mean cheap SSDs are coming next year. It means NAND is the one piece of the memory crisis with a plausible endpoint, while DRAM increasingly looks like it is along for the AI ride regardless of what consumers actually need. If you are planning a build around 2027 pricing, it looks like the SSD might finally cooperate. The RAM probably will not.