Let's say you have this friend, right? And let's say they took one look at the current memory pricing apocalypse, and the knock-on effect it's having on NVMe SSDs, before scoffing, "Well, I'll just pick up some SATA drives—I'll save money, then!" Well, this friend of ours might want to get a hustle on, as these may become pricier and harder to find very soon.

Why? Samsung may announce as soon as January that it will be ceasing production of SATA SSDs—at least, according to the multiple industry sources that gaming and tech news channel Moore's Law Is Dead claims to have spoken to. This report predicts that the winding down of SATA SSD production will contribute to already rising storage prices over the next two years.

The Moore's Law Is Dead report reasons that, with so much of system and storage memory stock being eaten up by the rapidly expanding AI industry, it makes sense that Samsung would move away from more budget consumer fare like SSDs with a SATA interface. In fact, Samsung announced it was partnering with Nvidia on an 'AI Megafactory' back in October.

But besides the current AI-dominated landscape, NVMe SSDs can also be cheaper to produce while also reaching speeds unimpeded by their interface of choice. SATA interfaces enjoy a theoretical top speed of 550 MB/s or so, effectively bottlenecking any speedier NAND that may be housed within. With AI taking a bite out of the NAND apple, it's not hard to see why Samsung would rather put its supply to better, more profitable use elsewhere.

Along similar lines, SATA shells are just one more manufacturing cost for companies like Samsung to worry about. On the other hand, the 'what you see is what you get' design of NVMe drives may be more fragile, but it is also vastly more appealing to a manufacturer's bottom line.

Samsung isn't the only company that's made the headlines by bailing out of a much-loved market, either. Just a few weeks ago, Micron announced that it will shut down its Crucial consumer product line (DRAM, NVMe SSDs, and SATA SSDs) early next year.

However, the Moore's Law Is Dead report says it's not all doom and gloom, positing that the memory apocalypse won't necessarily continue past 2028 like some other predictions suggest, with prices potentially dropping towards the very end of 2026. The reasoning is that locally hosted AI apps will become much more in-demand and widespread around 2027, therefore requiring all the beefy memory hardware currently experiencing a shortage to be redirected to the production of consumer devices once more.

Either that or AI fails to make this consumer-focused pivot, and the swirling bubble of circular investments pops very dramatically. However, if this latter scenario plays out with a bubble one market analyst described as four times the size of the subprime mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 global crash, then a memory shortage may be the least of anyone's concerns.