Sony has temporarily suspended orders for many of its memory cards because of the ongoing global storage shortage that’s affecting the pricing and availability of things like RAM, GPUs, and game consoles, current and future. The company did not say when it will resume selling the products; just that it will continue “monitoring te supply situation,” according to a Peta Pixel translation of the Japanese language announcement.
The suspension, which started Friday, March 27, affects six models of CFexpress Type A and B, which are high-performance memory cards meant for things like professional digital cameras, along with nine models of its SD cards. Here’s the full list, from a machine-translation of the article:
CFexpress Type A Memory Card
“CEA-G1920T” “CEA-G960T” “CEA-G480T” “CEA-G240T”CFexpress Type B Memory Card
“CEB-G480T” “CEB-G240T”SDXC/SDHC memory card
“SF-G256T” “SF-G128T” “SF-G64T” “SF-M512T” “SF-M256T” “SF-M128T”
“SF-E256” “SF-E128A” “SF-E64A”
For each of those, the number represents the storage level of the card – CEA-G1920T is a 1,920GB card, for example. That list means tiers will remain, like the 320GB and 640GB Type A cards or the 960GB and 1,920GB Type B ones. At the moment, even some of the temporarily discontinued cards are still available on Sony’s website and elsewhere, but don’t expect that to last as remaining supply dwindles. The list doesn’t include any Sony microSD cards, and thankfully, you can still find and buy many IGN’s favorites for the Switch 2, handheld gaming PCs, and the Steam Deck.
The RAM and memory crisis, brought on by massive demand from AI companies, continues to have widespread effects across all of the technology industry, effects that will make for a very expensive and weird gaming generation. We’ve already seen signs of that, in Steam Deck supply issues and Valve’s inability to put a price or release date on the Steam Machine. (The company is still targeting 2026.) The beginning of the year saw manufacturing disruptions for the RTX 5070 Ti, too, and shortages could mean we’ll be waiting a while for the Sony PlayStation 6. It’s expected – though not guaranteed – that Nintendo will hike prices on the Switch 2, soon.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.