TrendForce said demand for enterprise SSDs from major U.S. cloud service providers has increased over the past two weeks, with QLC products contributing most of the incremental volume alongside high-performance TLC drives. Based on recent orders, the research firm said total enterprise SSD bookings in the fourth quarter could top the third-quarter high, supporting continued price increases.
U.S. cloud providers raise orders as deployment scales up
According to TrendForce, large U.S. cloud service providers, or CSPs, have been lifting procurement of enterprise SSDs in recent weeks. The firm said the increase reflects both faster infrastructure buildouts and broader use of enterprise SSDs across more workload types.
From the latest order flow, TrendForce estimates that fourth-quarter enterprise SSD order volume could exceed the peak reached in the third quarter. With buyers placing additional orders, NAND Flash manufacturers have gained a stronger position in capacity allocation and price negotiations, which the firm said supports further gains in enterprise SSD pricing.
QLC becomes the main source of growth
TrendForce said QLC drives, which offer lower cost per unit of capacity and larger single-drive capacities, are now the main source of demand growth. It said the driver behind QLC enterprise SSD demand has shifted from early large language model, or LLM, training to AI applications that are closer to production use.
In North America, deployments of agentic AI systems that can execute tasks autonomously are increasing. Those systems require much larger volumes of real-time data to be called and cached. TrendForce also said QLC adoption is expanding in vector databases that store large amounts of unstructured data.
In these scenarios, the firm said QLC offers the strongest cost-performance advantage. As agentic AI adoption spreads, penetration of QLC enterprise SSDs in North American cloud and data center infrastructure could continue to rise.
China sees a different use case tied to DeepSeek
TrendForce said China is showing a different application path. New AI architectures represented by DeepSeek are pushing KV Cache offload to large-capacity QLC enterprise SSDs. KV Cache stores previous computation results during large language model inference to avoid repeated calculations, and that data is usually kept in relatively expensive memory.
Moving part of that KV Cache data to high-speed, large-capacity QLC enterprise SSDs can improve inference efficiency at lower cost, according to TrendForce. The firm said China could expand adoption of QLC enterprise SSDs as these architectures develop.
After a slower third quarter, demand turns stronger again for Q4
Earlier this year, TrendForce said major North American cloud providers had been aggressively stocking up since late 2025, and estimated that QLC enterprise SSD prices would rise 53% to 58% quarter over quarter in the first quarter of 2026, the largest single-quarter increase on record. In its third-quarter outlook released in July, the firm said broader NAND Flash contract price growth had slowed to 10% to 15% as contract prices reached historical highs and end-market affordability hit a ceiling.
The latest demand increase from major U.S. cloud providers within a two-week span, together with new QLC use cases in North America and China, suggests that enterprise SSD demand is spreading from training workloads to inference. TrendForce did not disclose a specific fourth-quarter price increase forecast for enterprise SSDs in this update, and said that will need to be confirmed in later quarterly pricing estimates.