Storage Chip Price Surge Sweeps Through Industry Chain, New Round of Cost Test Arrives

On March 18, cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Smart Cloud simultaneously announced price increases for AI computing power and storage products, with the highest rise reaching 34%. Since the second half of 2025, global storage chip prices have entered a new cycle of price hikes, and the ripple effects are continuing to unfold. Recently, OPPO and vivo announced price increases for their smartphones. According to Xinhua News Agency on March 18, Samsung Electronics in South Korea may experience a large-scale strike, adding further pressure to the already tight supply and demand for storage products.

Industry insiders say that storage chip prices will remain firm in 2026-2027, as the entire industry chain faces a new round of cost challenges.

Tightening Supply Situation Worsens

As the world’s largest manufacturer of storage chips, Samsung Electronics’ capacity fluctuations directly impact the global semiconductor market. The global storage chip market has already been under supply pressure due to the rising demand from AI data center construction, and Samsung’s strike will undoubtedly exacerbate this situation. Public data shows that Samsung Electronics holds a 43% share of the global storage chip market, with DRAM products accounting for over 60% of that. Zhang Huiyuan, Director of Corporate Ratings at Fitch Ratings Asia-Pacific, told China Securities Journal that risks from Samsung strikes, controlled capacity expansion, and challenges in migrating to advanced processes will keep the storage chip market tight.

At the same time, Zhang Huiyuan also believes that demand outside of AI remains weak, limiting further price increases. Therefore, the mid-term outlook of the agency is that storage chip prices in 2026-2027 will stay strong, with gradual capacity increases preventing severe shortages. However, this cannot fully resolve supply issues, and industry profitability and credit fundamentals are expected to remain robust.

Mobile Phones May Experience Price Hikes

Industry experts believe that this wave of storage chip price increases is not just a typical market cycle fluctuation. The core driver is a structural supply-demand imbalance triggered by AI, combined with supply contraction and low inventory levels. On the demand side, AI servers have become “storage giants,” with memory requirements per AI server being 8-10 times that of ordinary servers, squeezing consumer-grade product supplies. On the supply side, leading manufacturers are adopting a “discard low-end, pursue high-end” strategy, with Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and others shifting over 80% of their advanced capacity to high-margin HBM, directly reducing mature capacity.

The rising prices of upstream storage chips have already affected the smartphone industry. It is reported that after the price hikes, the cost share of memory semiconductors in smartphone bill of materials (BOM) has increased from 10-15% to over 20%, with some mid- and low-end models seeing memory costs exceeding 40%.

On March 10, OPPO was the first to announce a price adjustment for some products. On March 16, vivo issued a price adjustment notice, announcing that starting March 18, the suggested retail prices of some vivo and iQOO products would be adjusted, becoming the second major brand to follow suit.

Xiaomi Group Chairman and CEO Lei Jun previously told China Securities Journal that the memory price increase has multiple impacts on business, with terminal manufacturers across the industry facing significant cost pressures. Lei Jun also stated that, as a standardized product, memory pricing has global and cross-industry characteristics, and Xiaomi will try to offset these costs by improving internal efficiency. He emphasized that Xiaomi has strong supply chain integration and scale advantages, and has developed comprehensive strategies to effectively respond to this round of memory price hikes.

Honor CEO Li Jian also said that the current AI-driven memory shortage cycle is expected to last 2-3 years, and manufacturers need to enhance technology and cost control capabilities to navigate the industry cycle.

Cloud Providers Also Raise Prices

Alongside smartphone price adjustments, the cloud computing sector is also experiencing a price hike. On March 18, Alibaba Cloud and Baidu Smart Cloud announced price increases for core products such as AI computing power and storage, signaling a collective price adjustment among domestic cloud providers.

Alibaba Cloud’s announcement states that due to the global surge in AI demand and supply chain price increases, the prices of computing cards like the Pengtou Ge Zhenwu 810E have risen by 5-34%, and the CPFS (Intelligent Computing Edition) file storage product has increased by 30%. Baidu Smart Cloud also raised prices for AI computing-related services by approximately 5-30%, with parallel file storage and other services up about 30%.

Both companies cited significant increases in core hardware and infrastructure costs as key reasons for the price adjustments, with the explosive growth in “Token calls” driven by AI applications being a major factor.

As AI large models move from chat dialogues to multi-step execution applications, token consumption has surged dozens of times, and inference computing power demand has grown exponentially.

In fact, the price hikes among domestic cloud providers are not isolated. Upstream hardware such as GPUs, HBM, SSDs remain high in price, continuously pushing up AI server costs and increasing operational pressures for cloud providers. The global cloud computing industry’s pricing strategies have undergone significant changes. In January, AWS, the global leader, broke its nearly 20-year tradition of “only lowering prices” by raising prices for EC2 machine learning capacity for large model training by 15%. Google Cloud also announced price increases for AI infrastructure, data transfer, and other services, with hikes up to 100%.

Looking at industry trends, the upward trend in storage chip prices is expected to continue. This means that the cost pressures caused by these price increases will impact multiple sectors such as semiconductors, consumer electronics, and cloud computing over the next two years. Structural adjustments and capacity upgrades across the entire industry chain will be key to responding to these industry cycles.