What we know so far: With hardware and semiconductor makers struggling to meet surging AI demand, prices for critical PC components have soared in recent months. A new report indicates that AI-driven consumption is now causing storage shortages, with delivery times for enterprise hard drives stretching beyond two years.
According to Taiwan tech publication DigiTimes, most AI firms are unwilling to wait two years for HDD supplies to stabilize and are shifting to SSDs instead. To contain costs, they are choosing QLC NAND-based drives over the faster, more durable, and more expensive TLC variants.
Industry observers expect the surge in QLC-based SSD demand from data centers in the US, Canada, and China to trigger a consumer SSD shortage. Since most mainstream drives already use QLC NAND to stay affordable, the shortfall could push costs even higher, adding pressure to consumers already facing record hardware prices.
Analysts believe that with AI firms adopting QLC en masse, it will surpass TLC in total sales by early 2027 – a seismic shift for the SSD market. The report also notes that AI companies are already stockpiling QLC NAND ahead of an expected shortage, leaving some manufacturers' production capacity fully booked through 2026.
The rapid growth of the AI sector and the race toward artificial general intelligence have put a massive strain on the infrastructure supporting hyperscale data centers. Beyond GPUs and accelerators, the surge has driven unprecedented demand for every layer of PC hardware – from CPUs and memory to high-speed networking and large-scale storage arrays.
Soaring demand has pushed component prices sharply higher, with DRAM climbing nearly 50 percent in recent weeks. Reports indicate that AI data center operators in the US and China now receive only about 70 percent of their DRAM allocations, even after agreeing to pay the inflated rates.
The price surge extends beyond high-bandwidth memory. An earlier DigiTimes report notes that demand for standard DDR5 RDIMMs now exceeds supply, as major chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix divert production from consumer markets toward higher-margin AI components.