AI Reshapes Memory Landscape! HBM, DRAM, NAND Market Shuffle – Who Will Control Next-Gen Computing?

AI has already pushed memory chips from 'price competition' into a 'capacity and technology competition.' In the future, the real determinant of industry position will no longer be market share, but rather who controls the supply of key memory components such as HBM, high-end DRAM, and enterprise SSDs—this will decide pricing power and leadership at the upstream of the AI supply chain.

By mid-2026, the transformation in the memory chip industry has already surpassed the cumulative changes of the past five years. Samsung Electronics (KR005930), SK Hynix (KR000660), and Micron Technology (MU-US) have successively crossed the trillion-dollar market capitalization threshold, setting an unprecedented record in the semiconductor industry. Once considered synonymous with 'cyclical stocks' and thin profit margins, memory chips have now become the most sought-after strategic resource in the global AI infrastructure race.

The core of this transformation is not simply price competition, but a structural war driven by AI server demand, HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) capacity allocation, the DDR5 generational transition, and a reshuffling of enterprise SSD demand.

According to market research firm CFM's flash memory market statistics, the global DRAM and NAND flash memory market reached a total size of $137.14 billion in Q1 2026, a staggering 81.6% increase from the previous quarter and a year-on-year surge of 245%, setting a new all-time high for a single quarter.

Analysts point out that this growth is not gradual expansion, but a fault-line explosion caused by severe supply-demand mismatch, with original equipment manufacturers' pricing power completely reversed within just two quarters.

DRAM Rankings: Samsung Maintains Leadership, CXMT Emerges Rapidly

In the DRAM sector, Samsung Electronics leads with $38.2 billion in revenue and a 40.5% market share, achieving a quarterly growth rate of 98.4%. SK Hynix follows with $27.9 billion in revenue and 29.6% market share. Micron Technology ranks third with $18.7 billion in revenue and 19.9% market share.

Notably, Chinese manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT, 688825-CN) entered fourth place with $7.3 billion in revenue and a 7.7% market share, recording the highest quarterly growth rate among the four at 115.1%.

Industry observers note that Samsung's advantage does not stem from speculative price hikes, but from its massive production scale across smartphones, PCs, servers, and end devices, allowing it to absorb risks through internal orders during downturns—a risk-hedging capability that SK Hynix and Micron currently lack.

In contrast, while SK Hynix maintains leadership in HBM, it has sacrificed expansion speed in traditional DRAM, resulting in the slowest overall revenue growth among the four major players.

What surprised the market was CXMT's rapid rise. Its global market share jumped from 3% in Q1 2025 to 7.7–8% in the same period of 2026, surpassing Nanya Technology (2408-TW) to become the world's fourth-largest DRAM manufacturer.

As China's only vertically integrated DRAM design, development, and manufacturing (IDM) company, CXMT currently operates three 12-inch wafer fabs in Hefei and Beijing, and has formed deep partnerships with key clients such as Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Tencent Holdings (00700-HK), Lenovo Holdings (03396-HK), and Xiaomi (01810-HK).

Analysts believe this growth was not due to low-price bidding, but rather because Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron shifted their primary capacity to HBM and high-end server memory, creating a market vacuum in mature-process and consumer-grade DRAM—precisely filled by CXMT.

This phenomenon raises a critical point for supply chain decision-makers: as the three giants focus their most advanced capacity on the HBM arms race, 'non-mainstream' product categories such as DDR3, DDR4, LPDDR, and automotive and industrial-grade memory have become scarce resources. This allows companies like CXMT, Nanya Technology, and Winbond Electronics (2344-TW) to find new survival space and pricing leverage without direct confrontation.

HBM Supply Crunch: Samsung and Micron Rush to Catch Up

HBM is the most dramatically overpriced product in this memory super-cycle and the biggest bottleneck for AI chipmakers like NVIDIA (NVDA-US) and AMD (AMD-US).

Currently, SK Hynix leads with a 58% market share, down from 69% a year earlier. Samsung Electronics follows closely with 21% market share and has begun supplying HBM4 to NVIDIA. Micron also holds 21% market share and is seeking technological breakthroughs.

Samsung has already delivered initial HBM4E samples and plans to begin mass shipments to NVIDIA in the second half of 2026—an important variable that could break SK Hynix's long-term monopoly.

However, supply tightness is unlikely to ease in the short term. Industry sources indicate that current HBM market fulfillment rates are only around 30%, with significant shortages in stacked DRAM.

Although Samsung and SK Hynix have five-year expansion plans focused on DRAM—SK Hynix increasing monthly capacity from 600,000 to 1.2 million wafers, and Samsung from 700,000 to 1.4 million—the industry estimates that memory bit demand is growing at over 20% annually. Even doubling capacity over five years appears conservative and insufficient to fully close the supply-demand gap.

In other words, this shortage cannot be resolved simply by adding a few production lines within one or two years.

NAND Market More Fragmented: Kioxia and SanDisk Emerge as Dark Horses

Compared to the four-player DRAM market, the NAND landscape is more fragmented. Samsung leads with 29–31.6% market share, followed by SK Hynix at 18%, Kioxia at 14%, and Micron, SanDisk (SNDKV-US), and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) each holding around 13%, forming a three-way competitive structure.

Among them, YMTC's market share rose from 8% in Q1 2025 to 13%, the highest growth rate among all NAND manufacturers, directly benefiting from the price surge driven by supply-demand tension.

The most dramatically revalued companies in this cycle are Kioxia and SanDisk.

SanDisk, after being spun off and independently listed from Western Digital (WDC-US) in February 2025, shed the long-term drag of its HDD business on stock valuation. In Q1 2026, its data center revenue grew over sixfold year-on-year, making enterprise SSD its fastest-growing business line.

According to market research firm Counterpoint Research, global NAND market revenue reached $46 billion in Q1 2026, a 3.5x year-on-year increase—already surpassing the full-year total of 2023—with enterprise SSD accounting for 43% of the total.

Price Surge: Memory Chips Become Strategic Resources

More than market share figures, price trends better illustrate the frenzy of this cycle.

The spot price of DDR5 16Gb surged from a low of around $5.5 in May 2025 to over $40 in May 2026, an increase of more than sevenfold. The price of 1TB consumer SSDs doubled from around $45 to nearly $90.

In Q1 2026, DRAM contract prices rose 90–95% quarter-on-quarter, while NAND contract prices increased 55–90%.

TrendForce forecasts that DRAM contract prices will rise another 58–63% in Q2 2026, with NAND prices increasing 70–75%. Some DRAM products have already seen cumulative price increases of over ninefold from their 2023 lows, with NAND price hikes even higher.

Research firm Gartner offers an even more aggressive forecast, estimating that the average NAND price increase for 2026 could reach 234%.

On the demand side, AI data centers are experiencing explosive growth in demand for high-capacity PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs. Data center applications are expected to account for 60–70% of global NAND consumption.

Hyperscalers such as Meta (META-US), Microsoft (MSFT-US), and Google (GOOGL-US) have already locked in most of the available 2026 capacity through long-term contracts and advance payments, with some agreements extending to 2029.