As such, Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng claims a severe NAND storage looms. Phison is a giant in the storage space, offering a wide range of NAND flash memory chip controllers (like the E28 we previewed in June ) for solid state drives (SSDs), memory cards, and USB flash drives. The potential wrinkle in his assessment is that demand for AI hardware is largely centered on DRAM-based HBM, not flash memory. According to Khein-Sheg, SSDs will replace HDDs as mainstream storage in data centers when prices drop to twice that of HDDs. Furthermore, he says when, not if, the price gap between SSDs and HDDs become null, HDDs will officially be obsolete.