Procurement teams ordering all-flash data storage right now are in for a shock. The ongoing NAND flash shortage means that what used to arrive in a few weeks now takes months and costs more. Samsung will increase prices by at least 50% this year, SanDisk by 100%, and other leading suppliers by 50-80%. Companies failing to adjust are getting caught off guard.
Last October saw SK Hynix — one of the biggest NAND flash manufacturers — declare all NAND flash production already allocated to customers through the end of this year. This isn’t a blip so much as a new norm. Hyperscaler AI buildouts are absorbing fabrication capacity at an extraordinary rate, and newer GPU architectures have introduced additional flash storage demand that did not exist two years ago.
Think of a fabrication plant with ten production lines: Where eight once served the broader enterprise data storage supply chain, four or more now feed hyperscaler AI infrastructure, leaving everyone else to compete for what remains. As long as AI investment accelerates (and nothing suggests a slowdown), this is the new operating environment rather than a temporary disruption.
That supply-side squeeze would be concerning enough on its own, but demand is increasing. Nearly half of organizations expect their total data volumes to grow by at least 26% per year over the coming two years, according to research by ESG (an Omdia company). AI workloads are making the pressure particularly acute.
What should enterprise data storage buyers do?
When asked about the biggest data storage-related challenges facing their AI data collection and preparation environments, ESG also found 45% of organizations point to storage capacity planning. That outpaces the second most common concern, data security and compliance, by a full 21%. It’s only going to get worse. So how can enterprise procurement teams prepare?
Be flexible with your architecture
While all-flash storage might be more difficult to source, there’s nothing to stop you mixing it up. Rather than using traditional flash-dependent architectures, use hybrid architectures with NVMe, HDDs, and SATA-based SSDs.
Focus on storage efficiency
Storage efficiency is a good place to start. Modern all-flash systems compress and deduplicate data so that 100 terabytes of raw flash can behave like 400 terabytes of effective capacity.
That has always been useful, but in a world where sourcing new flash storage is slower and more costly, the financial weight of a strong data reduction guarantee has changed materially.
Pay attention to efficiency guarantees, and know that not all guarantees are equal. Some enterprise storage vendors commit to two-to-one ratios, while the most aggressive can reach five-to-one. The gap between those numbers represents real capacity that you must either buy with scarce NAND flash storage or gain through smarter engineering. Buyers once evaluated performance, cost, and features first and treated efficiency as a tiebreaker. Today, that order needs to shift.
Also, besides deduplication, customers can use several other storage efficiency features. These include thin provisioning, tiering, and caching. Intelligent data placement, where data is stored on the appropriate media according to its purpose, is also a valuable practice.
Sweat your assets
Then there is the question of what you already own. Lifecycle extension programs such as controller refreshes, firmware updates, predictive analytics, warranty extensions, and expanded support have always saved money. Now, they also take on a different character when replacement hardware faces unpredictable lead times.
Many traditional environments still have siloed, underused capacity that a careful audit would surface. The longer the NAND flash shortage persists, the greater the dividend from sweating existing assets harder.
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Finally, the supply chain reach of data storage vendors now matters for project delivery in a way it didn't a year ago. Picture two products with comparable specs and pricing. One comes from a smaller manufacturer, and the other from a global vendor with diversified logistics and deeper component relationships.
In a normal market, you might choose the smaller player for competitive leverage. Today, that smaller manufacturer may quote six to nine months for delivery while the global vendor ships in two to three weeks, and long-term agreements make their prices more predictable. Even when price and features are identical, that timeline gap introduces project risk that no shortlist should ignore.
The procurement checklist has not changed. It has grown. Performance, price, and features still matter, but storage efficiency guarantees, lifecycle extension options, and supply chain reach now belong alongside them. These are not temporary accommodations. They are the criteria that match the market we are actually in.
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results: The Critical Role of Storage in Building an Enterprise AI Infrastructure, September 2025. All research in this article is from this survey.
