6 Strategies to navigate the 2026 surge in NAND flash prices

The start of 2026 has seen a sharp spike in technical component costs, most notably in DRAM and NAND flash memory, driven by unprecedented demand from AI infrastructure projects and by manufacturers' capacity reallocation. As IDC points out, this is a major paradigm shift, with tremendous new demand from AI and hyperscalers now outpacing the smartphones and PCs that typically drove the market. Based on current market trends, we believe this new market dynamic is just beginning to create lasting ripple effects across the IT infrastructure landscape. 

For IT leaders, procurement teams, and business decision-makers, this is not just a short-term inconvenience - it’s a market reality that requires proactive planning. Below are six strategies to help mitigate the impact of rising flash costs and maintain operational efficiency. 

It’s important to optimize capacity utilization while balancing procurement needs as data storage requirements grow. Not all data needs to live on the highest-performing flash; you can and should right-size your workloads across high-performance flash, capacity flash, and hybrid flash to optimize costs across your overall infrastructure. For example, you can build NetApp ONTAP clusters using all three types of storage and seamlessly move workloads to capacity flash or hybrid flash without disruption. 

You should also ensure existing capacity is fully utilized. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights can identify orphaned storage that can be reclaimed. 

It also supports precise capacity planning, to ensure storage is purchased only when needed and in the right location. This can delay or reduce spending during high price periods and improve operational efficiency across your infrastructure.

Not all data needs to live on the most expensive flash. NetApp ONTAP offers integrated automatic tiering that moves cold or infrequently accessed data to lower cost capacity tiers—whether HDD-based storage, capacity flash, or cloud “cold” tiers. 

By offloading cold data, you can free up flash for mission-critical workloads while reducing overall spend. ONTAP also enables disaster recovery and backup to disk-based or cloud solutions for secondary workloads. NetApp Disaster Recovery as a Service in public clouds can help balance flash purchases with the use of public cloud capacity for DR purposes, especially for less critical applications. 

When overall industry storage prices rise, savings elsewhere in the IT stack can help balance budgets. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights can assess your virtual infrastructure, identifying underused hosts that can be consolidated and decommissioned, saving on licensed VM cores. 

And with NetApp Shift, migrating virtual machines between hypervisors is fast and easy, enabling you to move to lower cost virtualization platforms when appropriate. These optimizations free up budget that can absorb potentially higher storage costs without compromising overall IT strategy.

In traditional procurement cycles, organizations occasionally feel the need to buy significant capacity in advance, because of how complicated it can be to granularly expand storage. This can leave unused capacity sitting idle, and locks in inflated costs when NAND prices are high. 

NetApp’s unified scale-out architecture for file, block, and object storage allows you to add controllers or shelves incrementally, month by month, without disruption. This makes it simple to expand only when business critical needs arise. 

For even greater flexibility, NetApp Keystone Storage as a Service delivers the exact capacity you need, billed only for what you use. As your business grows, NetApp can automatically expand capacity in a fully managed model, eliminating the need to prepurchase storage during peak pricing cycles. 

Cloud storage pricing is influenced by NAND costs but often follows a different cadence than hardware procurement. NetApp ONTAP is the only enterprise storage software available as a first-party native service in all three major public clouds: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. And NetApp is not raising prices for its cloud storage software. 

With ONTAP’s global namespace, you can replicate or cache data across clouds and on-premises systems, enabling seamless workload movement. This gives you the ultimate flexibility to rebalance spend between environments as market conditions change, without sacrificing performance or security. 

NetApp’s pricing philosophy is built around lifecycle value instead of short-term commodity cycles. Customers benefit from continuous ONTAP innovation, security hardening, operational efficiency, and deep integration across on-premises and cloud environments—all supported by disciplined, transparent pricing. NetApp’s efficiency features, such as storage footprint reduction, automation, and performance optimization, directly lower TCO over the system’s lifecycle.  

This approach enables predictable budgeting and avoids reactionary purchasing during volatile market cycles. NetApp provides clear guidance on renewals, scope, and consumption options, ensuring you can plan without fear-based decision-making. 

Some vendors may claim they are holding list prices steady, but reduce available discounts or partner margins, leading to higher effective costs. NetApp encourages customers to compare apples to apples—looking at net price for the total value received. 

The surge in NAND flash prices in early 2026 is an unprecedented seismic shock for IT procurement strategies. While market forces driving these increases are beyond any single organization’s control, NetApp’s portfolio offers proven ways to mitigate the impact. 

From just-in-time expansion with scale-out architectures and Keystone, to workload mobility with ONTAP, to reclaiming capacity and optimizing data placement, NetApp enables customers to maintain performance, control costs, and plan with confidence. 

By thinking holistically and leveraging NetApp’s flexibility, transparency, and lifecycle value approach, organizations can weather volatile pricing cycles and emerge stronger when the market stabilizes.