TECH NEWS – After the PlayStation 5 price increase, Sony has delivered another unpleasant surprise: in Japan, the company has effectively frozen new orders for most of its SD and CFexpress memory cards, and right now there is no clear sign of when sales will properly resume.
The global semiconductor shortage has been hammering tech companies for months, but storage products are now taking some of the ugliest hits. So far, most of the damage had shown up as painful price increases across various product categories, but Sony has now gone a step further and made a move few major brands have been willing to make. Demand for NAND flash from AI data centers has become so intense that it is eating up a huge share of worldwide output, and the consumer market is now getting squeezed hard because of it.
Memory card prices from major brands, including SanDisk, have already been climbing for months, and forecasts suggest the pressure is not going away anytime soon. Sony, however, has not stopped at higher prices, and has instead suspended new orders for almost its entire CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SD card lineup, both for authorized distributors and for direct customers through the Sony Store. Sony Japan’s statement is brief, but it gets straight to the point. The company says that, because of the global semiconductor shortage and other factors, supply for CFexpress and SD memory cards is not expected to catch up with demand in the near future. The bad part is that Sony has given no restart date whatsoever, which means customers are left with uncertainty and a vague promise of updates later on.
Among the hardest-hit products are the TOUGH cards popular with professional photographers, but lower-capacity and more mainstream SD models are also caught in the freeze. For now, the measure directly affects Japan, but signs of strain are visible in other markets as well. On Sony’s store in Spain, for example, the available SD card stock leans heavily toward higher-capacity models starting at 128GB, while the cheaper and smaller options are much thinner on the ground. The main trigger still appears to be the massive AI-driven appetite for NAND chips, but supply pressure could get even worse because helium-related disruptions are also affecting parts of the semiconductor chain.
Phison’s CEO, whose company is a major supplier of controllers used in SSDs and memory cards, has already warned that the NAND shortage could become so severe that entire consumer electronics companies might be pushed toward collapse if the situation does not improve. Sony has, for now, pulled the handbrake in Japan on CFexpress Type A, Type B, and SD cards, but the crunch is being felt far beyond one market. In other words, it is not just the PS5 getting more expensive – Sony’s storage business is starting to look shaky too.
Source: Sony Japan, 3DJuegos
