If you’ve bought memory cards recently and felt like the price didn’t match what you remembered, you’re not imagining it. A SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB SD card that sold for around $30 in January 2026 was going for about $52 by March a roughly 70% jump in two months. CFexpress cards, which pack more NAND flash into a smaller, more specialized product, have it worse: some CFexpress Type B cards have more than doubled in price since late 2025.
The actual cause has almost nothing to do with cameras. AI data centers are buying up the same NAND flash memory that goes into your SD and CFexpress cards, and manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron among them have been shifting factory capacity toward higher-margin High Bandwidth Memory chips built for AI accelerators instead. Consumer and prosumer storage got squeezed as a side effect of a completely different industry’s demand spike.
Sony Japan suspended orders for nearly its entire memory card lineup effective March 27, 2026, citing the global semiconductor shortage directly, with no stated recovery timeline. Most industry analysts covering the space don’t expect meaningful relief until new NAND fabrication capacity comes fully online realistically, mid-to-late 2027 at the earliest.
Consumer electronics has never been the priority customer for NAND flash manufacturers it’s always been a volume business competing against bigger, steadier buyers like smartphone and laptop makers. AI data center demand didn’t just add a new competitor to that queue, it added one willing to pay far more per chip than a camera card manufacturer ever could, because the economics of an AI accelerator can absorb memory costs that would make a $50 SD card a $200 SD card. When a factory has to choose which order to fill first, the math isn’t close.
Budget more for media on every job for the foreseeable future, and don’t wait until the week of a shoot to buy cards if you can help it — availability, not just price, has gotten unpredictable. If you’re quoting projects, it’s worth building current media costs into estimates rather than pricing off what cards cost a year ago. It’s also worth reconsidering how much redundant storage you’re actually carrying on a job versus how much you think you need out of habit every card in the bag now costs meaningfully more than it did in January.
PhotographyTalk. “The Camera Memory Card Shortage of 2026: Why Your SD Cards Cost More.” https://www.photographytalk.com/camera-memory-card-shortage-2026. 2026.
PhotoWorkout. “Memory Card Prices Won’t Drop Until 2027 — Why AI Is Making Your SD Cards More Expensive.” https://www.photoworkout.com/memory-card-prices-ai-shortage-2026/. 2026.
Yahoo Tech. “Sony Suspends Nearly All Memory Card Orders, Blaming AI-Driven Chip Shortage.” https://tech.yahoo.com/cameras/articles/sony-suspends-nearly-memory-card-155127032.html. 2026.