Organization: YMTC's NAND Shipment Market Share Rises to 14%, Entering Top Three Globally

August 12th - Market research firm Counterpoint Research reported that in the second quarter of 2026, as AI workloads shifted from training to inference, enterprise SSD (eSSD) accounted for 48% of global NAND shipments, close to twice the 26% share from the same period last year. The growth in server-side demand led to a tightening of consumer-grade NAND supply, driving industry revenue to a record level, nearly five times higher than in the second quarter of 2025.

On the supplier side, Samsung maintained its top position with a 25% shipment share, down from 32% in the second quarter of 2024, primarily due to prioritizing high-margin DRAM production capacity. SK Hynix ranked second with a 22% share, and its subsidiary Solidigm saw a 40% increase in NAND bit shipments. Yangtze Memory's shipment share rose to 14%, surpassing Kioxia to enter the global top three for the first time; its shipments increased by 22% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter.

Counterpoint noted that while Yangtze Memory ranked third in terms of shipment volume, it was fifth in terms of revenue, lagging behind Micron and Kioxia, mainly because its product structure is still focused on consumer-level applications, with a lower share of high-priced data center eSSDs. The company plans to further increase the proportion of eSSD products in the second half of the year.

The report projects that by the end of 2026, server eSSDs will absorb over half of global NAND bit shipments. As servers become the main source of NAND demand, future supplier competition will depend more on high-value product portfolios rather than just overall shipment volume.