According to TrendForce’s latest memory spot price trend report, regarding DRAM, spot prices for DDR5 products have finally stabilized this week as contract prices have room for further hikes. As for NAND flash, the story seems to be different as the wave of price slashes is only going to become even more apparent as China’s Double 11 shopping festival approaches. Details are as follows:

DRAM Spot Price:

Regarding DDR5 products, spot prices have stabilized this week as contract prices have room for further hikes, and there have also been occasional small price hikes in spot transactions. As for DDR4 products, spot prices show signs of stabilization but have experienced the same kind of increase as DDR5. Overall, demand remains weak for consumer products, suggesting further price drops are possible. The average spot price of mainstream chips (i.e., DDR4 1Gx8 2666MT/s) has fallen by 0.31% from US$1.911 last week to US$1.905 this week.

NAND Flash Spot Price:

The reduction of inventory has become the priority for the spot market that is currently experiencing sluggishness in demand and purchase sentiment, seeing how truncations have been frequently happening among retail and channel markets, where several module houses of a larger scale are even selling their client SSD at a loss just to get rid of existing inventory. This wave of price slashes is only going to become even more apparent as China’s Double 11 shopping festival approaches. Spot market prices are thus expected to remain on the downward trajectory. 512Gb TLC wafers have dropped by 0.08% this week, arriving at US$2.493.

In the era of AI and big data, new market demands are emerging in the storage industry, and QLC NAND SSDs, which play a critical role in AI training. This suggests that NAND flash may be on the verge of a new growth opportunity.

QLC, or Quad-Level Cells, refers to NAND flash where each storage cell can record 4 bits. Each cell maintains a standard size, and compared to traditional SLC, MLC, and TLC technologies, QLC enables higher data density, allowing more data to be stored in the same space.

The Advantages of QLC Flash

QLC flash offers several key advantages:

• Capacity: Compared to mainstream TLC flash, QLC increases storage density by 33%.
• Cost: With the same number of flash chips cut from a wafer, QLC provides about 33% more storage capacity than TLC, leading to a lower cost per unit of storage.
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): QLC-based SSDs offer lower TCO compared to traditional HDDs. TCO includes considerations like storage density, reliability, and power consumption. While QLC’s write performance is somewhat inferior to other technologies, its read performance is strong.

However, QLC technology also faces some challenges. Since data is stored across more charge levels, this increases the risk of data vulnerability, requiring more advanced error correction and data protection mechanisms. QLC storage devices typically need stronger error correction algorithms and robust data protection to ensure integrity and reliability.

Despite these challenges, as technology continues to advance, QLC is expected to play an increasingly important role in the storage field, potentially revolutionizing the entire information industry.

QLC NAND is Entering the AI SSD Battlefield

Many believe that QLC SSDs are a complement to TLC SSDs, particularly suited for read-intensive and mixed read/write workloads, such as those found in AI, content delivery networks, and machine learning.

In AI applications, TrendForce points out that SSDs are used in AI inference servers to help adjust and optimize AI models during inference, especially by updating data in real-time to fine-tune model outputs. AI inference mainly supports Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs), and SSDs can store reference documents and knowledge bases for RAG and LLM to generate richer responses.

As more generated information is displayed as videos or images, data storage demands increase, making large-capacity SSDs, such as 16TB+ TLC/QLC models, essential for AI inference.

Currently, companies like Samsung, SK Hynix’s Solidigm, Western Digital, and Kioxia hold key positions in the QLC SSD market.

Industry experts are optimistic about the future of QLC SSDs, emphasizing their benefits for data centers, cloud storage providers, and enterprises handling massive amounts of data. QLC SSDs are seen as a potential game-changer for the NAND flash market.

TrendForce also predicts that QLC will account for 20% of NAND flash shipments by 2024, with this share expected to rise in 2025. Moreover, QLC is likely to expand into consumer-embedded storage such as eMMC and UFS, with some products already adopting QLC as the storage medium.

Industry forecasts suggest that by 2025, large-capacity QLC enterprise SSDs will rise, and smartphones will start using QLC-based UFS storage solutions.

(Photo credit: Samsung)

Japanese NAND flash memory giant Kioxia had reportedly planned to delay its October IPO. According to the latest report from Reuters, Kioxia’s major shareholder, U.S. investment firm Bain Capital, abandoned the October IPO plan after investors valued the company at only half of its target.

Reuters reported on the 11th that sources familiar with the matter said investors, citing the slow recovery of the semiconductor market, requested Bain Capital to slash Kioxia’s IPO valuation (market cap at the time of listing) to around half of the target value. This led Bain to abandon the plan to list Kioxia at the end of October.

The report cited two sources stating that while Bain Capital had set a target valuation of 1.5 trillion yen, investors valued the company at around 800 billion yen, far below the initial goal. One source added that during discussions with institutional investors in August and September, most agreed that the memory market still needed time to fully recover.

Although Bain Capital and Kioxia will continue to seek an opportune moment for the IPO, most market insiders believe that listing within this year will be challenging.

When the delay in Kioxia’s IPO was first reported in late September, TrendForce noted that the NAND flash market began to show signs of a price reversal in the third quarter of 2024 after three consecutive quarters of profit recovery.

Along with weak consumer demand, some companies have also slowed down their AI server deployments, potentially leading to an oversupply. With investors expressing concerns about the industry’s outlook, Kioxia’s decision to go public at this time may not yield a favorable valuation. The company has therefore opted to strategically delay the IPO, waiting for a market recovery.

According to TrendForce data, Kioxia maintained its position as the third-largest NAND flash brand by revenue in Q2, with a market share of 13.8%. Samsung led the market with 36.9%, followed by SK Group at 22.1%.

(Photo credit: Kioxia)

According to TrendForce’s latest memory spot price trend report, regarding DRAM, trading volumes in the spot market continues to fall during China’s National Day Golden Week, while a rebound is unlikely before the year’s end. As for NAND flash, buyers’ reluctance towards procurement has further exacerbated the excessive provision within the market. Details are as follows:

DRAM Spot Price:

It is now China’s National Day Golden Week, so trading volumes in the spot market continues to fall. Furthermore, some module houses are keen to lower their inventory levels, thus pushing spot prices to go down further. The supply-demand dynamics of the spot market remains unchanged, and a rebound is unlikely before the year’s end. The average spot price of mainstream chips (i.e., DDR4 1Gx8 2666MT/s) has dropped by 0.26% from US$1.934 last week to US$1.929 this week.

NAND Flash Spot Price:

The spot market was seen with sluggishness in transactions as buyers had not raised their willingness in stocking amidst the National Day holiday of China. Several suppliers are obviously selling their products at lower unit prices this week as sales pressure continues to envelop the entire market, which however has yet to alleviate the overall status, where buyers’ reluctance towards procurement has only further exacerbated the excessive provision within the market. Spot prices of 512Gb TLC wafers have dropped by 0.58% this week, arriving at US$2.595.

Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass producing PM9E1, a PCle 5.0 SSD with the industry’s highest performance and largest capacity.

According to Samsung’s press release, the PM9E1, which is built on its in-house 5nm-based controller and eighth-generation V-NAND (V8) technology, will provide powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency, making it an optimal solution for on-device AI PCs.

Key attributes in SSDs, including performance, storage capacity, power efficiency and security, have all been improved compared to its predecessor (PM9A1a), Samsung notes.

According to Samsung, thanks to the eight-channel PCIe 5.0 interface, the sequential read and write speeds of the new SSD have more than doubled compared to the previous generation, reaching up to 14.5 gigabytes-per-second (GB/s) and 13GB/s, respectively.

This powerful performance enables faster data transfer even with data-intensive AI applications, allowing a 14GB large language model (LLM) to be transferred from the SSD to DRAM in less than a second, Samsung states.

The PM9E1 offers a range of storage options, including 512GB, 1 terabyte (TB), 2TB and the industry’s largest capacity of 4TB. The 4TB option is especially an optimum solution for PC users in need of high-capacity storage for large-sized files such as AI-generated contents, data-heavy programs and high-resolution videos, as well as tasks that require intensive workloads such as gaming.

Additionally, the significantly improved power efficiency of over 50% allows for longer battery life which is ideal for on-device AI applications, according to Samsung.

For stronger security measures, Samsung has applied Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) v1.2 to the product. The SPDM specification provides ‘Secure Channel,’ ‘Device Authentication’ and ‘Firmware Tampering Attestation’ technologies that can help prevent supply chain attacks involving forgery or manipulation of stored data in the product during production or distribution processes.

Starting with PM9E1, Samsung plans to expand its advanced SSD offerings to global PC makers and expects to launch PCIe 5.0-based consumer products in the future to solidify its leadership in the on-device AI market.

(Photo credit: Samsung)