Driven by the rapid expansion of the global AI industry, the NAND Flash storage market is facing a structural shortage. According to media reports, Pan Jiancheng, CEO of Phison Electronics, said in a recent interview that the scale of global AI users continues to expand, and the frequency of use will also usher in leapfrog growth in the future.
He analyzed that the development of AI must require DRAM and NAND Flash, and the larger the scale of the AI model, the higher the demand for storage capacity. After companies invest a lot of money to purchase GPUs, generating revenue will generate data, which drives storage demand.
Although major original manufacturers continue to expand production capacity, the new production capacity is still far from keeping up with demand growth. It is expected that the tight supply and demand situation will be difficult to alleviate in the short term, and storage shortages will be more serious next year than this year.
Previously in April this year, Pan Jiancheng broke through the industry's inherent perception and put forward a point of view, proposing that "whoever gets the Token will win the world". In the future, as long as enterprises have sufficient storage space, "they can obtain endless revenue."
Pan Jiancheng said at the time that the speed of AI data generation was advancing a hundred times, but the newly built NAND Flash factory could only increase production capacity by 50% at most. He concluded that this wave of shortages may not be completely resolved in the next ten years.
In order to cope with the launch of new NVIDIA GPUs and Apple's new products, NAND Flash may face the dilemma of "you can't buy it even if you have money" in the fourth quarter. "I can't see a reason for the oversupply of storage," he said bluntly.
It is reported that in order to cope with the risk of serious shortages that may occur in the second half of 2026 or even the fourth quarter, Phison Electronics has entered a state of emergency preparation.
Public reports show that as of May this year, the company's NAND inventory has exceeded NT$50 billion, and it has launched an unprecedented fundraising plan totaling US$1.18 billion (approximately NT$43 billion).
This huge amount of funds will be used to lock in the supply of wafers and storage particles in advance to prevent the extreme market situation where money cannot buy the goods.
