The massive AI infrastructure buildout is placing a significant strain on the entire semiconductor supply chain, with one often overlooked component being NAND-based storage. According to Phison Electronics CEO Pua Khein-Seng, the NAND flash shortage could last an entire decade. CEO Pua warned that an upcoming NAND flash shortage is estimated to begin in 2026 and could stretch across the next decade. This claim is much higher than anything we have seen, where these shortages last only a year or two. Speaking in a recent interview, Pua said that the combination of surging AI-driven storage demand and limited recent investment in flash capacity has placed the memory market on a collision course with extended turnaround times.

Pua Khein-Seng put much of the blame on an earlier investment hangover. He argued that after prior cycles where heavy spending led to price collapses, many flash makers pulled back, slowing expansion. He noted that starting around 2023, a significant share of capital was redirected into high-bandwidth memory used for model training, as the margins there were more attractive. As a result, NAND received less focus just when demand began rising again. He also emphasized a shift inside cloud operations from training to inference, adding that inference workloads and model storage create large and persistent requirements for NAND flash. As one of the major controller designers for SSDs, the Phison CEO knows precisely where the demand is headed, many quarters ahead of the public.
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