The global shortage of solid state memory has claimed its first photographic victim, as Sony has announced that it is suspending fulfillment of all orders for nearly its entire SD and CFexpress memory card product lines.
Sony Japan published the notice on its website today:
Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.
Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.
Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.
The suspension includes all of Sony’s memory card lines, including CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SD cards. The 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1920GB capacity Type A cards have been suspended, as have the 480GB and 240GB Type B cards. The full gamut of Sony’s high-end SD cards has also been suspended, including the 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB TOUGH-branded cards and the lower-end 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, and 256GB plainly-branded Sony cards, which cap out at V60 speeds. Even Sony’s lower-end, V30 128GB and 64GB SD cards have been suspended, showcasing that the SSD shortage affects all types of solid state, not just the high-end ones.
It appears that only the 960GB CFexpress Type B card and the lowest-end SF-UZ series SD cards remain in production. However, those UHS-I SD cards are discontinued in the United States outside of a scant few retailers and resellers.
“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our customers,” Sony concludes.
This notice does indicate that Sony at least intends to bring these products back at some point, but the company did not provide a timeline for when it thinks it can resume production.
At the time of publication, all of these memory cards are still in stock at U.S.-based B&H Photo, but given that Sony intends to freeze all manufacturing until the market has stabilized, once the existing stock of these cards are gone, they won’t be restocked until manufacturing spins back up.
The aforementioned SSD shortage is due entirely to the seemingly endless hunger of AI datacenters for memory. The cost of memory components is going up because the supply for the actual dies that make up all types of SSDs is finite and being largely consumed by enterprise companies looking to expand AI data centers. But it isn’t stopping at price increases. Because supply is finite, that also means that at some point, there simply isn’t enough hardware to even make certain products anymore.
As a result, Sony has decided to back out of memory card manufacturing until the market stabilizes. It’s the first to do this in the photography segment, but it is unlikely to be the last.
