Sony suspends memory card orders amid tight NAND supply 

Sony says it will no longer take orders for its memory card products due to its inability to secure supplies.

Sony supplies CFexpress and SD memory cards for products such as digital cameras. These typically use TLC 3D NAND, which is used by mainstream enterprise SSDs. Supply has become limited due the popularity of AI inference and training. These AI workloads require faster delivery of data to AI GPU servers than disk drive storage can satisfy. Prices of such enterprise SSDs have risen and it is more profitable for manufacturers to supply flash chips for enterprise SSDs than for memory cards. NAND bits for AI-focused SSDs make more money than NAND bits for camera memory cards.

NAND chip manufacturers are prioritizing the supply of NAND to enterprise SSD products rather than to consumer products. Back in December last year, Micron walked away from its Crucial-branded consumer SSD business to focus more on its enterprise memory and SSD operations. Sony has now been affected by the same dynamics that prioritize enterprise SSD business over the consumer memory card business. It has issued a statement suspending orders for such memory cards.

In detail, Sony will no longer accept orders for its CFexpress type A memory cards, CFexpress type B memory cards, and SDXC/SDHC memory cards. The CFexpress cards have a PCIe interface and read and write data faster than the SDXC/SDHC memory cards, which rely on a UHS-11 bus. The CFexpress cards can provide around 800 MB/s read and 700 MB/s write speeds. The SD cards typically supply less than 300 MB/s read and write I/O speed.

It can be expected that other memory card suppliers will be similarly impacted. There is no timeline for Sony to resume accepting orders for its CFexpress and SD memory cards. Therefore, this suspension of orders for such cards will be in place for some months, meaning until there is sufficiently more NAND fabrication capacity to resume the supply of consumer products.

This expansion of NAND supply is not likely to happen until late 2027 or 2028 at the earliest.