CoreWeave locks in Solidigm SSD supply as NAND prices rise 15%

Storage has become the second component after GPUs that AI clouds must contract for years in advance.

CoreWeave signed a multi-year agreement with Solidigm on August 5 for priority access to enterprise SSD capacity, as NAND contract prices rise 10-15 percent quarter over quarter and flash allocation becomes a scheduling problem for AI infrastructure.

"The agreement gives us priority access to the storage our roadmap depends on, allowing customers to focus on what they are building instead of the infrastructure underneath it," Sachin Jain, chief operating officer at CoreWeave, said. Paul Palonsky, executive vice president and head of global sales at Solidigm, said the agreement "reflects the confidence Solidigm has in CoreWeave's growth and its position as a full-stack AI cloud provider."

CoreWeave's Q1 2026 revenue reached $2.078 billion, up 111.6 percent year over year, against a revenue backlog of $99.4 billion as of March 31. The company spent $7.695 billion on property, equipment, and capitalized software in that quarter alone, guided full-year 2026 capital expenditures to $31-35 billion, and crossed 1GW of active power with more than 3.5GW contracted. TrendForce projects NAND flash contract prices rising 10-15 percent quarter over quarter in Q3 2026, with conventional DRAM up 13-18 percent, and describes the DRAM market as extremely tight.

Storage has become the second component after GPUs that AI clouds must contract for years in advance. Western Digital told investors last week that its hard drive long-term agreements now extend into calendar 2029 through 2031, and SK hynix is committing KRW 100 trillion to its Cheongju fabs because AI has pushed NAND demand past supply. Every layer of the storage stack is being contracted forward at once.

Why Flash Allocation Became a Scheduling Problem

An AI cloud consumes enterprise SSD capacity in three places. Checkpointing during training writes enormous files at high frequency. Object storage tiers feed data to GPU nodes fast enough to keep them busy. The third is newer and growing fastest: KV cache offload during inference.

StorageReview's testing of KV cache offload to flash on a Dell PowerEdge XE7740 with four NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs and eight Solidigm D7-PS1030 12.8TB drives cut worst-case time to first token on resumed sessions from 13.9 seconds to 3.2 seconds. It held roughly 30,000 tokens per second at sustained load, 2.2 times the VRAM-only baseline. Moving KV cache off VRAM onto flash converts a memory capacity ceiling into a storage capacity purchase.

Density is the other half of the argument. Solidigm's current flagship is the D5-P5336, a 122.88TB drive built on 192-layer QLC NAND, drawing 24W active with a 0.6 DWPD endurance rating. In a Dell PowerEdge R7725xd, that capacity point puts nearly 3PB in a single chassis. For an operator filling gigawatts of contracted power, the difference between 61.44TB and 122.88TB per bay is measured in racks, floor space, and switch ports.

Solidigm's Timing and What Comes Next

The same day CoreWeave published the release, the Korea Economic Daily reported that Solidigm was pursuing a pre-IPO capital raise ahead of a possible Nasdaq listing, with figures ranging from roughly 5 trillion to 10 trillion won. SK hynix responded the next day in a regulatory filing, saying its overseas subsidiary "is reviewing various measures to strengthen its competitiveness" but that "no matters have been determined as of the date hereof." The company committed to disclosing details either when confirmed or within one month of that August 6 filing.

SK hynix reorganized its wholly owned US NAND unit under a new California entity in January, with Solidigm described as the anchor asset of a $10 billion American AI investment vehicle. The company now has a self-imposed September deadline to say more. A marquee multi-year supply agreement with the highest-profile AI cloud on the market is a useful item to have on the sheet during a month like that.

Solidigm has also said where its capacity ceiling is headed. Roger Corell, the company's senior director of AI and leadership marketing, has stated publicly that Solidigm plans to ship 245TB-class drives before the end of 2026. That would match the density Micron reached with the 6600 ION, which StorageReview put through the lab in June at a quarter petabyte per drive bay.

Three things will show whether this release is a milestone or a placeholder. The first is whether either company ever attaches a number to it — multi-year with no capacity, no term, and no value is a signal to customers and investors rather than a contract disclosure. The second is whether the 245TB-class Solidigm drive ships on the stated timeline and whether CoreWeave is an early taker. The third is whether other AI clouds follow with named SSD supply agreements of their own. SK hynix has told regulators it will say more about Solidigm's capital plans by early September.

For investors, the deal reinforces that storage procurement is becoming as strategic as GPU procurement for AI cloud operators. CoreWeave's Meta agreement alone represents approximately $21 billion of potential infrastructure revenue through 2032, and the company has also signed major agreements with Anthropic and Perplexity in 2026. Backblaze, which signed a $335 million multi-exabyte agreement with CoreWeave in June, reported Q2 revenue of $42.7 million with B2 ARR up 39 percent year over year to $113.3 million. The storage supply chain is tightening across every tier, and the companies that locked in capacity early are the ones positioned to scale.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.