The Chinese company entered the top 3 NAND memory manufacturers for the first time

The market report for the second quarter of 2026 published by research firm Counterpoint Research on August 12 showed that Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) shipped 14% of total global NAND flash production.

Thanks to that, the Chinese company is among the three largest NAND manufacturers in the world for the first time, pushing Kioxia (Japan) to fourth place. Samsung continues to lead with 25% market share, SK Hynix ranks second with 22%, while Micron ranks 5th.

YMTC's promotion comes as AI data centers are consuming record amounts of memory. Enterprise-class eSSD hard drives used up 48% of total NAND chip capacity sold globally in the last quarter, up sharply from 26% in the same period last year. The entire NAND industry's revenue also recorded a five-fold increase.

However, in terms of revenue, YMTC ranks 5th after Kioxia and Micron. The reason is that most of YMTC's output serves the personal consumer segment, which is much cheaper than eSSD contracts provided to cloud server manufacturers.

According to Tom's Hardware, being placed on the US entity list from December 2022 makes YMTC encounter barriers in achieving certification to supply Western data centers, where the largest source of profit is. Their market is mainly contained within China and the consumer segment that competitors leave behind.

In addition, Samsung's market share also decreased from 32% in the second quarter of 2024 to 25% because the company proactively reduced NAND output to focus on DRAM and HBM with higher profit margins. Meanwhile, Kioxia has also sold its entire 2026 production capacity to corporate customers.

When NAND contract prices increased by 75% in the second quarter of 2026, big companies gradually withdrew from the popular segment to follow the server fever, creating a large gap that YMTC quickly filled. The company increased output by 22% over the same period last year thanks to the successful commercialization of the 267-layer 3D NAND chip line on the Xtacking architecture, and is developing chip lines that exceed the 300-layer mark.

YMTC's third manufacturing plant in Wuhan exceeded the 50% mark of using domestic equipment according to Beijing's regulations and is expected to begin operations later this year.

Counterpoint predicts that eSSD hard drives will account for more than 50% of total global NAND capacity by the end of this year. Meanwhile, YMTC cybfx plans to pivot to eSSD thanks to strong capital support, but faces challenges in finding server customers outside of China.

Huy Duc