SSD pricing hit record highs in Q1 2026 amid high demand and insufficient supply of 3D NAND memory for consumer applications. Nonetheless, there are bright spots, too: Silicon Motion has managed to increase revenues from its SSD controllers business this year, particularly because sales of higher-end devices were high. Nonetheless, while the company is confident of demand from the data center sector, it also expects disparity between supply and demand for consumer applications to get worse going forward.
“Our high-end controller is selling very well, including PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 controllers, UFS 3.1 and eMMC 4.1,” Nelson Duann, senior vice president of Silicon Motions' client business unit, said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware. “But the low-end part [of the business is suffering as] consumer demand going down. But as ASP [of high-end controllers] is higher, it compensates [dropping sales of lower-end controllers]. So that is why our revenue momentum is still going up.”
