Memory & NAND Flash Crisis: May 2026 Update

What began as an AI-driven reallocation of manufacturing capacity toward HBM has compounded through consecutive quarters of record-breaking price increases, affecting enterprise IT budgets, consumer device pricing, and cloud infrastructure spending in equal measure.
Research Note: Kioxia’s Open Source AiSAQ ANN Search

Today, Kioxia announced the open-source release of All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization (AiSAQ), an approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) technology optimized for SSD-based storage. AiSAQ enables large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads by offloading vector data from DRAM to SSDs, significantly reducing memory requirements.