Phison CEO says 'both money and inventory are insufficient' as NAND prices continue to climb at an astronomical rate
Just when I had dared to hope the memory supply crisis might begin to feel slightly less apocalyptic, Phison Electronics CEO Khein-seng Pua has sounded the alarm that NAND prices are still climbing at an alarming rate. This time, Pua says that NAND prices jumped up by 50% overnight.This price increase is chiefly driven by outsized demand—namely from the AI industry—and severe supply constraints. As such, the Taiwanese memory controller supplier counts both hyperscale AI operators and cloud service providers among its recent clients, with enterprise SSDs now accounting for 30% of Phison's Q1 2026 revenue (Via DigiTimes).But even in such a financially favourable position, Phison is still having to contend with a tricky supply landscape. Though the company has already signed long-term agreements with two DRAM as well as six NAND suppliers, it is continuing to negotiate prepayment plans to ensure it will have priority access to supply should the shortage continue to worsen.It is a popular belief that suppliers are raking it in during this memory shortage—and to be clear, Phison's inventory did rise from NT$35.6 billion to NT$50 billion between the end of 2025 and the last day of February 2026. Still, Khein-seng Pua has said, "Our current concern is that both money and inventory are insufficient."Indeed, the company board has recently approved a syndicated loan plan between US$400 million to US$500 million to better support both its growing inventory, as well as research and development costs.
Furthermore, what may seem like a nice little nest egg of existing inventory for Phison carries a huge amount of risk. For instance, the market may shift again, and the value of Phison's inventory could crater. But as Samsung reportedly confirmed a DRAM price increase of 'over 100%', and HP claims that both RAM and storage now account for 35% of the total cost of its PC, such a seismic shift still seems far off.It may not be all doom and gloom though, as major players like Phison aren't content to be passive presences in such a landscape. For instance, the company is touting its aiDAPTIV+ technology extension as a balm to constrained DRAM supply. Phison's aiDAPTIV+ architecture "accelerates inference, significantly increases memory capacity and simplifies deployment to unlock large-model AI capabilities on notebook PCs, desktop PCs and mini-PCs."In short, it's a bid to boost integrated GPUs and make the most of limited RAM in what may otherwise be considered underpowered machines. For those much less interested in thrashing against locally hosted AI models from the comfort of their own notebook, Nick's testing last month demonstrates that 16 GB of system memory is still absolutely fine for today's PC games (with some caveats, mind). Otherwise, it appears Phison is keeping an eye on which way the wind is blowing and isn't taking its current direction for granted.