Surging NAND demand drove record quarterly revenues for the big five memory manufacturers in Q2, reflecting accelerated inventory restocking for AI storage tiers.
The top five NAND vendors increased their combined revenue by 77 percent between the second and third quarters, leveraging surging AI demand to significantly raise average selling prices.
According to TrendForce, the top five suppliers generated $68.87 billion in revenue during the second quarter, with growth projected to continue into the third. The firm attributed this performance to “steady” AI server demand, particularly for enterprise SSDs, alongside persistent supply constraints that continue to tighten market conditions.
This revenue surge reflects the dominant pricing power of leading manufacturers. Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Kioxia, and SanDisk were able to “raise ASPs significantly through contract negotiations.”
Notably, these five major producers have no immediate plans to substantially expand overall manufacturing capacity. “Suppliers are generally prioritizing capital expenditure on DRAM and HBM, limiting new NAND Flash capacity,” the analysts noted. “ASPs are therefore expected to continue supporting overall industry revenue growth in the third quarter.”
Samsung retained the market’s top position with $23 billion in revenue, though its market share dipped slightly from 31.6 percent to 29.3 percent. SK Hynix, holding second place, increased its share from 17.6 percent to 18.2 percent, while Micron rose from 13.9 percent to 15.1 percent, securing third place.
Kioxia’s share fell marginally from 13.9 percent to 13.6 percent, while SanDisk’s portion declined from 13.9 percent to 11.4 percent.
Collectively, the top five accounted for 87.6 percent of the overall market, a slight decline from their combined 90.9 percent share in the first quarter. Despite these minor shifts, market observers remain unconcerned.
In a research note published earlier this week based on insights from the Flash Memory Summit, BNP Paribas stated: “As workloads transition towards inference, no single memory technology can economically handle every AI workload. High-bandwidth Flash (HBF) shows promise, though a talk from Google, SK Hynix, and SanDisk indicate HBF is best used as a tiered memory pool for KV cache that is complimentary to HBM rather than a direct replacement of HBM on an xPU.”
In a separate analysis, BNP Paribas added: “SanDisk has strategically invested in datacenter products, which now accounts for 25 percent of sales. Datacenter is expected to reach 1.2 ZB of NAND flash demand by 2030, which is the estimated size of the NAND market today.”
SK Hynix’s reported figures include Solidigm, the NAND business it acquired from Intel in 2020. Last week, speculation emerged that SK Hynix may pursue a U.S. initial public offering for Solidigm to secure additional capital while retaining operational control. However, some market analysts cautioned that such a move could raise concerns regarding shareholder value dilution.
When reached for comment, a Solidigm spokesperson stated: “Solidigm is working with SK Hynix to explore options for our growth, but we don’t have anything specific to comment on at this time.”
Meanwhile, Micron deployed part of its cash reserves this week, with Micron Ventures announcing “a $250 million investment built to partner with the companies shaping the future of AI and spanning the full AI technology stack - model architecture, compute, enterprise applications and physical AI.”