Soaring demand for AI-capable infrastructure is causing a spike in orders for SSDs, and manufacturers are raising the prices across the board.
Market analysis by TrendForce has claimed demand is expected to rise by 60% in the coming years, pushing suppliers to boost development and manufacturing and focus on producing higher-capacity products to meet the growing needs of power- and data-hungry AI tools.
Though HDDs have played a crucial role in data storage over the years, the lower latency of SSDs has become preferential in an increasingly AI-focused era.
AI is to blame for skyrocketing SSD prices
Solid state drives are useful for storing model parameters and creating checkpoints to save AI model progress in order to ensure quick recovery in the case of interruptions. They typically prove more reliable, with quarterly and annualized failure rates reported by cloud storage giant Backblaze showing stronger performance compared with HDDs (however it’s worth noting that more in-house data is available for HDDs thus a totally fair comparison cannot be drawn).
They’re also important for inference, where they allow real-time updates to models. However, because of this, high-capacity drives with at least 16TB of storage are required, with prices considerably higher than the equivalent HDD.
TrendForce highlighted the rising demand has already pushed contract prices for SSDs up by an eye-watering 80% in the space of three quarters. Moreover, the overall capacity of AI-related SSDs procured in 2024 is expected to exceed 45 exabytes (45 million terabytes).
Enterprise customers aren’t the only ones being affected – consumer SSD prices have also seen a significant and sustained price increase in recent quarters thanks to constricted supply.
Although work is being done to improve SSD storage, including higher-density NAND flash components, AI’s impact on SSD prices could continue to be seen for many more quarters, increasing the strain on both business and consumer markets alike.
Via The Register
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