Price has tripled, surpassing gold! Some merchants openly say: I can't even accept this price myself.

Recently, the global storage market has experienced a new wave of price increases, with core storage products such as memory cards and RAM continuously rising in price, affecting the retail end market.

At Hangzhou Bainaohui Digital Mall, many merchants selling storage products openly stated, “Such price hikes have never happened before.”

“I’ve been in this business for nearly 20 years. The prices used to be quite stable. Now, prices change daily, and the increase is too high. I can’t even accept these prices myself.”

On February 25, media reporters learned from several digital product consumers that the prices of camera storage cards, once considered photographic consumables, have risen, with most SD cards, TF cards, and CFexpress Type-B cards (hereinafter referred to as “CFB cards”) doubling in price.

Consumer Guo Chen (pseudonym) recently planned to upgrade his camera with a 1TB CFB high-speed card but found the price had already exceeded 4,000 yuan, more than doubled from before. He ultimately chose to buy an SD card. “I only knew that computer memory prices had gone up. Recently, I got a new camera and just realized that camera memory cards have also increased,” Guo said.

Other camera storage cards have also experienced varying degrees of price increases. A consumer who bought a TF card a week before the Spring Festival saw a price increase of over 46% in just ten days. Another consumer reported that the price of SD cards rose from over 600 yuan to more than 1,000 yuan.

Several camera equipment store owners also sensed this change. Photographer and store owner Sun Jun (pseudonym) said that the prices of camera storage cards have risen significantly, with overall doubling and some even tripling or quadrupling. Store owner Liu Xu (pseudonym) also stated that the price increase of camera storage cards is the highest, with some rising by as much as 60%.

Fu Yifu, a special researcher at the Su Commercial Bank, pointed out that the widespread increase in camera storage card prices, with many categories doubling, is the result of upstream cost transmission, structural shifts in production capacity, and resonance with end-user demand, rather than short-term speculation. On one hand, the supply of storage chips has contracted, with Samsung, Micron, and others significantly reducing NAND and DRAM production starting in 2025, leading to inventory levels at a five-year low and causing flash memory prices to surge. On the other hand, AI servers are capturing capacity, with manufacturers prioritizing advanced process nodes for more profitable enterprise storage, squeezing consumer-grade memory card capacity. Additionally, end-user demand, driven by Spring Festival travel and the needs of content creators, has increased procurement, while channel stockpiling has worsened shortages, collectively amplifying the price hikes.

【Source: China Economic Net】