At the start of the year ProGrade Digital announced that it would be increasing prices for its memory cards, due to the rapidly rising cost of flash memory. Well, just three months later and ProGrade's Co-Founder has revealed that it's raising prices again, as the cost price of flash memory continues to increase, with little sign of things stabilizing:
"Prices continue to rise, and we don't expect memory prices to go down in 2026," comments Mark E. Lewis, Prograde's Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Founder. "While some industry analysts project this could extend into 2027, we're focused on what we can see clearly: the pricing pressure and allocation constraints will persist through the remainder of this year. We did not make any price increases in April. However, our costs are increasing significantly, and we will have to increase prices in May. We're sharing this now not to drive urgency, but to give you the information you need to plan your own equipment decisions. Whatever timing works for your business, we wanted you to hear it directly from us."
It should be noted that this is an industry-wide issue and certainly not restricted to ProGrade Digital. 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 ProGrade Digital 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.
At least ProGrade has provided some advance notice of its forthcoming May price increase though. And while nobody wants to pay more for the same product, I for one am grateful that ProGrade is opting to increase prices rather than reduce product quality.
Check out our guide to the best memory cards, and to the best CFexpress cards
