Chinese NAND flash maker YMTC has recorded a significant market share expansion, making it the third largest supplier of flash storage, tying with Kioxia. According to tech research firm Counterpoint, YMTC has now surpassed both Sandisk and Micron in Q2 2026, shipping 14% of the total NAND on the market.
YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies Co) is a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer that specialises in NAND flash memory. The company was founded in 2016 to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign chip manufacturing, and is nowadays producing all sorts of NAND chips for mobile devices, consumer electronics, and data centres.
In 2018, YMTC debuted its Xtacking architecture, based on 2nd-gen 3D NAND, which entered mass production the following year. Fast forward to 2025, and the company’s 267-layer 5th-gen QLC 3D NAND has entered mass production, including the X4-9070 (1Tb TLC) and X4-6080 (2Tb QLC) chips, powered by Xtacking 4.0.
YMTC was quick to catch up with the big players, for which it can thank the AI boom. According to Counterpoint, the global NAND market in Q2 2026 was defined by the migration of AI workloads from training to inference, which pushed enterprise demand up to 48% of total bits shipped, nearly doubling last year’s demand.
This allowed YMTC to grab enough market share to surpass Sandisk’s 11% and Micron’s 13%, going head-to-head with Kioxia at 14%. SK Hynix holds second place with a 22% share, partly thanks to a 40% quarter-on-quarter jump in shipments from its subsidiary Solidigm. Meanwhile, Samsung still sits at the top with a 25% share, although this is noticeably down compared to Q2 2024’s 32% share, as its prioritised its resources on making high-margin DRAM.
According to Counterpoint, this increase in shipment volume is attributed to domestic and international demand. YMTC grew 22% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter, capitalising on the ongoing NAND shortages caused by demand for AI data centres. That said, the report indicates that, despite ranking third in market share, YMTC’s revenue share took fifth place, due to the company’s main focus being on consumer electronics, instead of high-margin enterprise/AI products, unlike Micron and Kioxia.
YMTC’s current product lineup includes its PE522 PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD for enterprise, promising a 14,200MB/s read speed and capacities of up to 25.6TB, plus the PC550 consumer drive, which offers up to 2TB of PCIe Gen 5.0 M.2 storage, reaching read speeds of up to 10,500MB/s. Counterpoint says that the company plans to shift the mix further towards enterprise SSDs in the second half of the year, in order to cement its third-place position globally.
