Driven by a new wave of AI, the global NAND flash memory market experienced explosive growth in the first quarter of 2026. Industry revenue soared 3.5 times year-on-year, setting a record of approximately US$46 billion in a single quarter. However, at the same time, the traditional PC market is under obvious pressure from high costs and demand shifts.
The latest report from market research firm Counterpoint Research shows that as of the first quarter of 2026, the global NAND market revenue has increased 3.5 times compared with the same period last year, reaching a single-quarter scale of US$46 billion. This number even exceeds the total NAND revenue for the whole year of 2023, highlighting the prosperity of the current storage market driven by AI. The core driving force for this round of growth comes from the boom in Agentic AI applications. Large-scale data center deployments are rapidly expanding. A single cluster often needs to accommodate hundreds of petabytes of data, which directly drives up the demand for high-capacity NAND storage.
From a structural perspective, enterprise-level demand has become the absolute main force in the NAND market. Statistics show that the enterprise level (mainly data centers and cloud services) will account for approximately 43% of total NAND demand in the first quarter of 2026, and is expected to exceed 60% by the end of this year, further strengthening the dominance of supply, demand and price in this field. At the same time, AI-related demand continues to drive up NAND contract and spot prices, causing suppliers' quarterly revenue to continue to rise.
In terms of manufacturer structure, Samsung still maintains its leading position in the NAND market, with a market share of about 29%, followed by SK Hynix and Kioxia. The latter two's combined revenue share also remains at a high level. Micron and SanDisk's revenue share is about 13%, but their advantages are being strongly impacted by Chinese manufacturers.
Of most concern is the rapid rise of Chinese NAND maker Yangtze Memory Technology Co., Ltd. (YMTC). The latest data shows that YMTC's global NAND market share has climbed to about 13% in the first quarter of 2026, a year-on-year increase of 246%, significantly narrowing the gap with international manufacturers such as SanDisk and Micron. Judging from the revenue division trend, Yangtze Memory's expansion is partly due to "stealing" some market share from Samsung, SK Hynix and Kioxia, reflecting its rapid improvement in mass production capabilities in key technologies such as high-level stacked NAND.
In the field of terminal storage products, Samsung remains the core force in the global SSD market. The report pointed out that Samsung maintains a clear lead in the global SSD market, followed by SK Hynix, while Kioxia, Micron and SanDisk are in the second tier. Although the terminal PC market is under pressure, overall NAND and SSD demand has not been directly affected by the macro downturn due to the continued expansion of data centers, enterprise-class storage, and AI training and inference platforms.
It is worth noting that Yangtze Memory is preparing to enter the Chinese capital market and plans to conduct an initial public offering (IPO) on the local stock exchange to further expand its capital strength. The company and Chinese DRAM manufacturer CXMT (CXMT) jointly promote the so-called "epic-level expansion" plan. Both plan to build or expand multiple wafer fabs to double the current production capacity. The goal is to significantly increase domestic self-sufficiency and global voice in the storage industry chain in the next few years.
Unlike the DRAM and NAND businesses that are seeing dividends from the AI cycle, the performance of the traditional PC market is obviously sluggish. Research firm IDC predicts that global traditional PC shipments will decline by approximately 11.3% in 2026, and will continue to remain weak in 2027. Signs of recovery will not appear until 2028–2029, and it may take until 2030 to truly return to a healthier shipment level. Calculated in terms of shipments, global PC shipments are expected to drop to approximately 260 million units in 2026, a significant gap from the previous year's more than 290 million units.
Industry opinion believes that the pressure on the PC market comes from multiple factors. On the one hand, as AI-related demand pushes up the prices of DRAM and NAND, the manufacturing cost of the whole machine has increased significantly, and the increase in terminal selling prices has suppressed consumption and traditional commercial procurement demand. On the other hand, a large amount of budget has been diverted to the construction of cloud and data centers, and the update cycle of traditional PCs by enterprises has been significantly lengthened, making it difficult for PC shipments to return to the high base level during the epidemic in the short term.
Although the overall PC market is under pressure, the industry is still actively looking for new growth points. The MacBook Neo launched by Apple is regarded as one of the representatives of the new generation of AI PCs. It uses self-developed chips and integrated platforms to form differentiated competitiveness in terms of energy efficiency and performance experience. In response to this trend, Intel has also promoted the implementation of new platforms such as Wildcat Lake. Some models, such as the Dell XPS 13, are positioned as direct competitors to the MacBook Neo, trying to provide a relatively close experience at a lower price to compete for the mid-to-high-end thin and light notebook market.
In the entry-level and mid-to-low price segments, Qualcomm is entering the laptop market through the Snapdragon C series platform. Related products focus on the selling points of "all-day battery life" and "lower overall machine cost". The target price range is roughly around US$300, trying to provide a relatively affordable AI PC choice in the current environment where PC prices are generally rising. However, from the perspective of the entire supply chain, the real cost reduction may not occur until the new DRAM and NAND production lines are officially mass-produced, and this time window is generally expected to be around 2029-2030. Therefore, it is still difficult to significantly alleviate the pressure on PC terminal prices in the short term.
Taken together, the new AI cycle is reshaping the revenue structure and industry focus of the information industry. On one end is the high-performance computing and data center business represented by Agentic AI, which continues to push up NAND and DRAM prices, driving storage manufacturers' single-quarter revenue to record highs. On the other end is the traditional PC market due to rising costs and shifting demand. It will be difficult to reproduce the peak shipments during the epidemic in a few years. As Chinese manufacturers accelerate production expansion, international giants increase their AI storage layout, and new generation AI PC platforms continue to emerge, the trade-off between the global storage and PC industries is likely to continue in the next few years.