It's becoming an all too familiar story: a memory card manufacturer announces an upcoming price increase. A few weeks ago Prograde Digital warned it would raise prices in May, and now OWC is following suit. In most cases the expected price increases are, however, reported to be relatively modest, rising by an average of 6% relative to April pricing.
The products in OWC's memory card portfolio most affected are CFexpress 4.0 cards, including the OWC 480GB Atlas Pro CFexpress 4.0 Type A card and the 2TB Atlas Ultra CFexpress 4.0 Type B card. These will both be subject to a 14% price hike, increasing by $40 and $150, respectively. And if you're after a 960GB Atlas Pro CFexpress 4.0 Type A card, that's set to cost $629.99, up from its current price of $569.99. Thankfully OWC's CFexpress 2.0 cards, along with many of its SD cards, will not receive increases (this time), though how long this will last remains to be seen.
However, it's particularly bad news if you're in the market for a new portable SSD. The price of a OWC 1TB Express 1M2 USB4 External SSD will jump 30%, increasing from $329.99 to $429.99. The 8TB version of the same drive will see a 21% price hike, going from an already hefty $1,729.99 to an eye-watering $2,099.99. Elsewhere in the OWC SSD range, prices are increasing by between 3% and 20%. And remember, all these percentage increases are measured against April pricing. We've already seen prices rising steadily since the start of the year, making these latest jumps even harder to stomach.
But it should be noted that this is an industry-wide problem and certainly not confined to OWC. Every manufacturer of products that use flash memory - memory cards, SSDs, RAM, etc - has hiked prices dramatically in 2026. The cause of these spiralling costs continues to be the unstoppable rise of AI. AI data processing centers devour high-bandwidth memory and fast SSD storage, causing AI companies to buy up huge stocks of solid state memory. This in turn is having a knock-on effect in other sectors that require DRAM and NAND flash memory, such as the memory card industry. Memory card manufacturers like OWC then have to fight for the remaining memory stock after the AI tech giants like Google, Meta, Nvidia and Open AI have paid top dollar to fuel their data centers. And when demand is high, prices go up, resulting in the ever-increasing memory card prices we're now being faced with.
