Most of the industry is focused on RAM and SSDs when it comes to the chip shortage that exploded in late 2025, but another storage segment is also being greatly affected by the lack of supply. According to a PCWorld investigation, USB drives and memory cards are showing massive price hikes from last year. In fact, we checked out several memory products on Amazon and compared their price histories on CamelCamelCamel and discovered that the median price increase across formats and capacities is a whopping 123%.
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While these storage formats are often slower than SSDs, they still use NAND chips from wafers that could be manufactured from the same production lines, with their differences coming from binning and quality tiers. So, it would make sense for memory chip fabs to optimize their production lines for higher-bin NAND chips for SSDs. These drives are often used by AI data center customers who are willing to pay a premium to secure the storage they need. This optimization, in turn, could lead to a smaller supply of low-bin NAND chips for USB flash drive and memory card manufacturing, leading to higher costs for brands like SanDisk and Lexar, among others.
Because of this, manufacturers are increasingly turning towards more premium products to justify their prices. Just last week, SanDisk quietly released a 2TB variant of its top-tier Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card for $2,000, meaning this card would cost photographers, videographers, and other users $0.98 per GB. By comparison, the lower-tier 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I SDXC card only costs $440, or about $0.21 per GB. SanDisk isn’t the only company doing this, as other manufacturers like Lexar and Kingston both have premium memory cards that are in a similar price range.
Memory card manufacturers have no choice but to adapt to the current realities of the market. “Facing the shortage of supply, our strategy is to focus on high-end products instead of expanding our factories or manufacturing,” Lexar Senior Marketing Director Lincoln Lin said during a company-sponsored media trip. He also added, “We think this is what we should do in the current supply shortage situation. Because of the supply limitations, we have to release more high-value products and keep some differentiation for our consumers.”
The market response to increasing prices has also been interesting. Lexar EU General Manager Grace Su pointed out that the company has prepared lower-capacity and lower-performance drives to give buyers options. “This is a curiosity for me as buyers have in their mind, ‘I would like a 1TB [drive]. 1TB is the minimum capacity I want to have. Now that I can only afford 512GB, I can wait,’” Su said. While she said this in reference to consumers purchasing SSDs, it could also apply to those looking for memory cards who need a minimum capacity for their specific use-case.
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