Western Digital and Kioxia’s NAND manufacturing facilities have been plagued by contamination difficulties, and Apple products may be harmed as a result (via TrendForce).
Due to tainted materials used at two of its operations in Japan in January, Western Digital claims to have lost 6.5 exabytes of 3D NAND flash storage. Western Digital and its partner, Kioxia, which was formerly part of Toshiba, jointly administer the facilities. For now, we don’t know what caused the contamination or when manufacturing will be restarted.
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An estimated 30 percent of the global NAND flash market is produced jointly by Western Digital and Kioxia, two of the largest SSD manufacturers. A TrendForce analysis of the SSD industry predicts a 10 percent increase in NAND prices beginning in the second quarter of 2022.
iFixit teardowns have proven that Apple employs NAND chips from Kioxia in several of its devices, including the iPhone 13 range, the iPad Pro, and the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Western Digital and Kioxia mainly sell SSD and eMMC storage drives for PCs. At this time, it’s unknown whether any existing Apple devices built using Kioxia storage in January will need a recall.
Until recently, Apple relied on Samsung for the majority of its Mac SSDs, but the business has increasingly moved to bespoke storage solutions, resulting in the soldering of SSD components onto the company’s M1 Macs.
Kioxia hardware contamination is unlikely to affect Apple products directly, but the tightening of supply throughout the industry may raise Apple’s prices. Whether the business would absorb or pass on these price increases to customers is an open question.