Sony halts memory card sales temporarily due to shortages

Sony has announced that the company is no longer accepting orders for nearly all the products in its CFexpress and SD memory card lines. This includes orders from the company’s authorized dealers as well as general consumers for “the foreseeable future”. With this move, Sony has become the first company in the photography segment to halt orders rather than simply raise prices. The demand for specialized chips for AI data centres continues to leave DRAM and NAND flash memory in short supply.

This means that there isn’t enough supply to meet the world’s consumers’ needs and the greed of AI superscalers. That means some customers will have to do without the memory chips they need, or pay absurdly inflated prices for them.

 Affected Sony products include several CFexpress Type-A, CFexpress Type-B, and SDXC/SDHC memory cards. Fifteen models are affected. This includes “CEA-G1920T”, “CEA-G960T”, “CEA-G480T”, “CEA-G240T”, “CEB-G480T”, “CEB-G240T”, “SF-G256T”, “SF-G128T”, “SF-G64T”, “SF-M512T”, “SF-M256T”, “SF-M128T”, “SF-E256”, “SF-E128A”, and “SF-E64A”.

Sony has also not stated when it expects to resume orders for its digital imaging storage products. The company anticipates that memory shortages will impact the company for the foreseeable future.

For now, the suspension of sales for these products appears to be Japan-only. However, it is worth noting that last week, Sony confirmed price increases across all PlayStation 5 models. The global memory shortage is clearly having an impact across Sony’s business.