TrendForce: Demand for NOR Flash continues to grow, and the average price is expected to rise 90-110% in the second half of the year

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to TrendForce Jibang Consulting's latest memory industry research, the NOR Flash market is undergoing the most important supply and demand structure transformation in the past ten years; with AI taking up most of the production capacity, the supplier's NOR Flash bit output increased limited. It is estimated that supply and demand will still be unbalanced in the second half of 2026. The overall contract price will remain high, and the price of high-capacity products may even double.

TrendForce Jibang Consulting said that even if all relevant suppliers have increased capital expenditure and expanded production, the additional production capacity must go through process reduction, yield climbing, product verification, and inclusion in customer specifications and design introduction (design-in), and cannot be immediately converted into usable supply in the market. Therefore, the gap in the medium to high volume market cannot be satisfied in the short term.

Analyzing the current supply situation of major NOR Flash manufacturers, Winbond (Winbond Electronics), which has the largest market share, had the biggest growth rate in 2026, mainly due to the full release of NOR products in the 45nm process and the process miniaturization effect brought about by the shift to 25nm/20nm. Although there was a limited increase in the number of wafer inserts, single-chip NOR bit shipments grew significantly.

The GigaDevice (603986.SH) product line, which occupies the second place in the market, covers the full capacity range of 512 Kb to 2 Gb, and is actively upgrading the manufacturing process with a capacity of 32 Mb or more in 2026. However, it transferred some NOR foundry to overseas fabs. The run-in period affected effective output in the first half of the year, and production capacity gradually recovered in the second half of the year.

MXIC (Wanghong Electronics) prioritized the addition of 12 inches of production capacity to more scarce NAND and eMMC in 2026, which limited the increase in NOR production volume, and NOR bit growth was also significantly lower than the increase in total production capacity.

AI and aerospace communications will be the main drivers of new demand in 2026

TrendForce Jibang Consulting pointed out that demand for NOR Flash continues to grow despite limited new supply. In addition to traditional advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), digital cockpits, and industrial control applications, the main new demand in 2026 will be in the field of AI and aerospace communication. Take AI Server as an example. The demand for NOR on a single server is three to five times that of a traditional server, and the AI server is equipped with a large number of Retimer chips. Each Retimer requires independent NOR Flash to load microcode, boosting high capacity and Octal SPI NOR requirements. In addition, local inference devices such as Edge-AI, AI PCs, and robots have driven the model firmware to expand several times, increasing the demand for high-density NOR Flash.

In the field of low-orbit satellites and aerospace electronics, the core chipset of the satellite body requires highly reliable NOR Flash to perform fast startup and firmware backup, and the ground receiving antenna also has built-in NOR to maintain real-time computation and OTA firmware updates. However, NOR for aerospace requires resistance to radiation and extreme temperature differences, establishing a technical threshold for some manufacturers.

TrendForce Jibang Consulting said that the average cumulative increase in NOR Flash contract prices in the first half of 2026 reached 100-120%, and it is estimated that price trends for products with different volumes will diverge in the second half of the year. There is strong demand for high-capacity products of 256 MB and above, such as AI servers and automotive applications. Coupled with the limited addition of new bits from major manufacturers, it is estimated that the average price in the second half of the year will still have room to rise by 90-110%.

In the low to medium capacity market of 128 Mb and below, with the gradual release of production capacity by some suppliers, the rise in consumer product prices is slowing down and will subsequently enter a high level of consolidation. It is estimated that the increase in the fourth quarter of 2026 will fall between 10-20%.