TrendForce: Benefiting from continuously upward revisions in North American market demand, Enterprise SSD prices are expected to continue rising in the fourth quarter.

TrendForce research shows that over the past two weeks, North American cloud providers have upwardly revised their demand for Enterprise SSDs. The main reason is that major CSPs are accelerating the expansion of Enterprise SSD deployment scale and application scenarios. Notably, this wave of demand is not only concentrated in high-performance TLC products; QLC products, which have lower cost per unit capacity and higher efficiency, are the main source of growth momentum. Judging from recent pull-in momentum, total Enterprise SSD orders in the fourth quarter are expected to break through the high point of the third quarter, showing a strong trend of continuous upward climbing. This has also significantly enhanced original manufacturers' capacity allocation and bargaining power in the enterprise market, further consolidating the foundation for Enterprise SSD prices to remain on an upward trajectory. Deepening AI applications and technology diffusion, from Agentic AI to KV Cache Offload TrendForce points out that the drivers of this wave of Enterprise SSD demand have extended from initial LLM training to more concrete AI implementation applications. As the construction of autonomous agent AI (Agentic AI) systems becomes increasingly prevalent, system demand for massive real-time data extraction and caching is growing exponentially. The application scale of QLC storage technology in vector databases is expanding in tandem, becoming the most cost-effective solution for carrying these unstructured data. It can be foreseen that the future popularization of Agentic AI technology will further increase the penetration rate of QLC Enterprise SSDs in North American cloud and Data Center fields. On the other hand, observing the dynamics of Chinese manufacturers, AI innovation architectures represented by DeepSeek are promoting the application of high-capacity QLC Enterprise SSDs in KV Cache Offload mechanisms. By appropriately offloading cached data from memory to high-speed and high-capacity QLC Enterprise SSDs, model inference efficiency can be improved at lower cost. In the future, the market may also have opportunities to expand the adoption of QLC Enterprise SSD products.