Kioxia has sold its entire 2026 NAND production before the year is properly underway, and the executive who said so does not expect cheap consumer SSDs to return.
Shunsuke Nakato, Managing Director of Kioxia's Memory Business Unit, told the Korean outlet Digital Daily, in remarks PC Guide carries in translation, that "To be honest, this year's production volume is already sold out. The days of cheap 1TB SSDs for around 7,000 yen (approximately $45) are over."
Decoded, that is a supplier telling its channel not to wait for a correction. Nakato put production cost inflation at "more than 30% year-on-year" and said he expects the trend to hold until 2027 at the very least, which removes the usual argument that a shortage clears once the current build cycle finishes.
He also described allocation in terms that should interest anyone without a long-standing contract. PC Guide reports he characterised Kioxia's approach as a "Gentleman's agreement" built on trust with existing clients rather than on first-come, first-served ordering or the highest bid. Translated into procurement terms: incumbency is now the only currency that reliably buys bits, and a new buyer arriving with a purchase order is bidding for capacity that is not there.
The supply side is moving the other way, which is the part that should worry anyone modelling a 2027 recovery. Blocks and Files reports, citing Omdia figures carried by Chosun Biz, that Samsung is cutting NAND wafer starts from 4.9 million in 2025 to 4.68 million this year, a 4.5 percent reduction, and that SK hynix is taking a 10 percent cut, from 1.9 million wafers to 1.7 million. Those two account for 60 percent of the global NAND market and they are shrinking output into rising demand, deliberately, to protect margin.
There is a reason Kioxia is not doing the same thing, and it is structural. Samsung and SK hynix both sell HBM, and a dollar of capital spent on HBM capacity returns more than a dollar spent on NAND, so NAND is the line that gets starved. Kioxia and Sandisk make no DRAM, so they have nowhere else to put the money. A prolonged shortage gives them a reason to push wafer output up while their larger rivals push it down.
Treat the Omdia numbers with the caution Blocks and Files applies to them. In November the same tracker had Samsung producing 4.72 million wafers in 2025, down from 5.07 million in 2024; the current figure for 2025 is 4.9 million. SK hynix was revised the same way, from 1.8 million to 1.9 million. Omdia's last published Kioxia figure, 4.69 million wafers in 2025 against 4.8 million in 2024, has not been updated at all.
The wafer count is also the wrong denominator. TLC is giving way to QLC, which is 33.33 percent denser per die, so bit output from Samsung and SK hynix can rise even as wafer starts fall, and the process conversion itself temporarily depresses wafer numbers while equipment and test flows are changed.
Enterprise buyers are already paying for the squeeze. VDURA puts a 30TB TLC enterprise SSD at $10,950, up almost 260 percent from $3,062 nine months earlier. On the consumer side PC Guide's price check has the Crucial P310 1TB at $106.99 against a low of $59.99 in mid-2025.
Bootnote: Kioxia is the former Toshiba memory business, spun out and renamed after the 2018 sale to a Bain-led consortium, and it invented NAND flash in the first place. The company that gave the industry the cheap flash die is now the one telling it that era has closed.
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