Sony japan halts memory card sales until 2026 as chip drought deepens
Sony’s Japanese division has slammed the brakes on every professional-grade memory card it sells—CFexpress and SD alike—freezing orders until March 2026. The reason is blunt: there are not enough semiconductors on the planet to feed cameras, recorders and PlayStations at the same time.
The full stop list
Photographers and video crews woke up to a near-empty catalog. Gone are the blister-fast CFexpress type A cards (1920 GB down to 240 GB), their type B siblings and every top-tier SDXC UHS-II variant Sony badges as “Tough”. Retailers can no longer restock; customers cannot even back-order. Sony’s statement apologises for the “inconvenience”, but the subtext is starker—we have no silicon to sell you.
The freeze is not collateral damage; it is pre-emptive triage. By refusing orders now, Sony avoids the reputational hit of perpetual “out of stock” banners and the costly customer-service spiral of cancelled weddings, film shoots and drone flights. It also buys time to decide which wafers it will fight for at the negotiating table: image sensors for its own cameras, NAND dies for PlayStation SSDs or controller chips for the VR headset it hopes will outgun Meta.
Console cash grabs and calendar slips
Last Friday the same company raised PlayStation 5 prices across most markets, blaming “continuing global economic pressures”. Translation: every component, from ABF substrates to voltage regulators, is being auctioned in three currencies at once. Memory cards are simply the first casualty you can actually touch; inside the PS5 the same flash packages keep save files alive.
Sources inside Sony’s supply-chain team say the next-generation PlayStation, once pencilled for 2027, has already slipped to 2028-2029. The memory crunch is not the only villain—AMD’s RDNA 4 roadmap is late and TSMC’s 3 nm allocation queue is a velvet rope—but it is the most visible. When a company halts revenue-generating accessories to protect console output, you know the ledger is bleeding red ink.
What this means for creators today
If you shoot 8 K RAW on a Sony A1 or FX6, start hoarding. Second-hand prices for CEΑ-G1920T cards have jumped 40 % on eBay since the announcement, and grey-market importers in Hong Kong are already demanding cash up front. Rental houses are shortening loan windows and doubling insurance excesses. The cruel irony: the more spectacular the camera you bought, the more hostage you are to a piece of plastic no wider than a postage stamp.
Sony promises to “review the situation periodically” and post updates on its product pages. Translation: do not hold your breath. Until foundries in Arizona and Kumamoto crank out mature 3-D NAND at yield levels that please accountants, the company will ration its silicon like wartime butter. Creators who once mocked “buffer anxiety” are about to learn what real scarcity feels like.