The AI memory boom is repricing the unfashionable end of the memory market. Macronix International, the Taiwanese maker of NOR flash, NAND and eMMC, told EE Times it has raised capital expenditure for 2026 to 37.8 billion Taiwan dollars to expand 12 inch wafer capacity and meet demand for 3D NOR, NAND and eMMC products, as the large memory makers shift capacity toward high bandwidth memory and advanced server memory and squeeze the mature lines.
Marketing director Martin Lin described the change as architectural rather than cyclical. AI servers consume far more flash per system than conventional servers, for boot up, firmware, system control and security across a larger count of controllers and switches: the previous generation rack carried about 600 to 800 flash devices, and the latest carries more than 1,000. Macronix says memory prices have risen sixfold over the past year on structural supply changes, and puts the combined market for NOR flash, SLC NAND and low capacity eMMC at about 24 billion dollars in 2026, with prices for those products expected to rise further through the third and fourth quarters before stabilising at elevated levels.
The company is also positioning for what sits beyond HBM. As model sizes grow, HBM capacity and cost become limiting factors for inference, and Macronix is promoting high bandwidth flash built on 3D NAND, plus dual tier SSD architectures designed to offload the key value cache that long AI conversations accumulate, so that less frequently used data can leave expensive HBM without being discarded. Its current 48 and 96 layer 3D NAND is in mass production, NOR flash is moving from 55nm toward 42nm, and low voltage flash is progressing from 3 volts toward 1.2 volts.
The warning in the interview is about duration and spread. New capacity takes two to three years to install, qualify and ramp, so Lin expects tight supply to persist into 2027, with pricing pressure becoming more pronounced in automotive markets from 2027 as AI demand keeps crowding out mature process capacity. That is the same shortage Samsung’s record quarter is monetising, arriving at the buyers least able to outbid a hyperscaler.