Kioxia CEO Hiroo Ota has instructed the company’s sales team not to seek further NAND flash price increases from data-center customers, warning that excessive pricing could weaken hyperscalers’ investment capacity and slow long-term memory-market growth. Kioxia’s NAND average selling price rose 70% in the second quarter from the first, after previously doubling. TrendForce expects third-quarter general-purpose DRAM prices to rise 13–18% and NAND prices 10–15%, a sharp slowdown from NAND’s 58–63% second-quarter increase as PC and smartphone makers confront affordability limits. Companies are responding by reducing memory components, considering lower-cost alternatives and developing ways to deliver comparable AI performance with less expensive memory. NVIDIA is evaluating multiple HBM configurations for Rubin Ultra, while HBF, KV-cache compression and CXL memory pooling seek to reduce reliance on scarce HBM. Hyperscalers’ 2025 AI infrastructure investment plans have risen to $1.3 trillion, but Samsung and SK Hynix inventories fell below 10 days in the third quarter. Kioxia’s April-June net profit rose 48-fold year over year to ¥869 billion and revenue more than quadrupled to ¥1.77 trillion. Ota also said Kioxia and SK Hynix were not discussing joint production, citing antitrust barriers and Kioxia’s NAND venture with SanDisk.