Research firm TrendForce recently released its forecast for storage semiconductor supply and demand, judging that the DRAM market demand growth rate by bit will be only 8.3% in 2023, a multi-year low, while the supply capacity will grow by about 14.1%. Flash market, despite being more resilient, will continue to be under pressure in the first half of next year.
TrendForce believes that the current downstream manufacturers are in the active de-stocking stage, and PC and server manufacturers are conservative in DRAM capacity planning due to cost constraints, but Sapphire Rapids and other new generation processors are starting to support PCIe 5.0 standard, which is expected to drive the demand for SSD capacity in enterprise market hardware. TrendForce expects the average capacity of enterprise SSDs to grow by 26% in the coming year.
For the other major downstream application market, smartphones, TrendForce expects DRAM single-unit capacity to grow by only 5% in 2023, while NAND flash single-unit capacity is still expected to grow at an annual rate of 22.1%.
