Western Digital said it lost at least 6.5 exabytes (6.5 billion gigabytes) of flash storage chips.
This is due to contamination problems in the production facilities. According to market research firm TrendForce, this issue has led to a 10% increase in the price of NAND which is the main component of SSDs.
According to TrendForce, the rising NAND price will have an impact on the PC market for the next few months. During 2021, the flash storage chip business is on the rise due to the growing PC market, even though there is a shortage of chips and demand for GPUs that do not match the supply.
The contamination problem at the Western Digital factory means that the material in the production process is contaminated. This problem was only detected at the end of January at two factories in Japan.
According to Kioxia (formerly Toshiba), which is a joint venture partner of Western Digital, this contamination problem occurred in its BiCS 3D NAND flash memory chip, as quoted by The Verge, Sunday (13/2/2022).
Western Digital and Kioxia currently supply 30% of the NAND flash chips on the market. Both Western Digital and Kioxia are suppliers of SSD and eMMC chips for PCs, and Westernd Digital is one of the main suppliers in the industry.
It is not known what caused the contamination of this production material. Likewise whether there will be products on the market that will be recalled, or when production at their factories will resume.
Western Digital only said that they are trying to do everything possible to get the factory operational as soon as possible.
"(Western Digital) is working hard with its joint venture partner, Kioxia, to implement everything that can bring back operations at its facilities as quickly as possible," Western Digital wrote in a statement.