Move Over Proof Of Stake
When it was announced that at least one major cryptocurrency was moving from proof of work to proof of stake there was concern that this could drive up the price of SSDs. This never happened to the extent that it did with GPUs, and SSD prices remained fairly reasonable; apart from PCIe 5.0 SSDs but that is always the case with new kit. Sadly, it seems that we are going to start to see a spike in prices and as seems to be the case lately, you can blame AI. Samsung expected to raise the price of their Enterprise SSDs by 15%, however the increased demand for AI storage means they will instead be raising prices by 25%.
This will certainly hurt data centers immediately but unfortunately it is likely to impact consumer models in the near future. AI has already impacted NVIDIA GPU pricing, as selling cards like the H100 is far more profitable than selling an RTX card, so we have seen demand for gaming GPUs continue to outstrip supply. The same is very likely to become true for consumer SSDs, as the profit margins on Enterprise SSDs is about to become far more attractive than consumer models. This will hopefully not be immediately felt but you should expect to see prices remain as they are at best; unfortunately it is far more likely we will see a slow increase in SSD prices over the year.
