Agents Are A Blessing For NAND Prices The market expected NAND prices to peak in Q3 2026 > Instead, NAND prices have taken a very different direction The reason? Hyperscalers' enterprise SSD demand is nearly double earlier forecasts Hyperscaler NAND inventories stood at about 14 weeks in July, below the normal level of 15 weeks, with inventories expected to decline further in Q4 2026 What's driving this demand? 1. Agents AI agents perform repeated retrieval operations, access large databases, and generate substantial amounts of intermediate data Unlike traditional chatbots, agents can execute multiple tasks autonomously, repeatedly accessing and processing information. This increases the amount of data that needs to be stored and retrieved Cloud providers are consequently expanding their use of high-capacity QLC enterprise SSDs for vector databases, retrieval, and caching QLC NAND allows them to store more data at a lower cost per bit, making it particularly attractive for these workloads 2. KV-cache offloading AI models need to remember the context of a conversation or task to avoid processing the same information repeatedly. This information is stored in what is known as the KV cache Traditionally, this data is kept in expensive HBM or DRAM. However, not all of it needs to remain in high-speed memory at all times By moving less frequently accessed KV-cache data to SSDs, cloud providers can reduce memory costs while maintaining access to much larger amounts of context TrendForce specifically identifies DeepSeek-related architectures in China as a driver of growing demand for high-capacity QLC enterprise SSDs for KV-cache offloading