The AI surge has not only led to a global supply problem, but it's also driving record revenue in the NAND segment; however, the PC market has taken a big hit.
NAND Suppliers Earn Record Revenue In Q1 2026 With China's CXMT Climbing Up To 13% of the Global Share
The latest market report shared by Counterpoint Research shows us the extent of the global NAND demand. As of Q1 2026, the NAND market has seen a massive 3.5x surge in global revenue, driving the tally up to 46 billion US dollars.
The strong demand is driven primarily by Agentic AI, which has led to a significant increase in data center deployments housing several Petabytes of data. Enterprise alone now accounts for 43% of the total NAND market for Q1 2026 and is projected to cross 60% by the end of this year. The first quarter revenue also crossed the full-year NAND revenue of 2023.
- NAND Memory revenues surged a massive 3.5x annually, mirroring the dramatic DRAM growth
- NAND prices driven by the expanding AI demand are pushing up the revenue every quarter.
- Samsung is the solid No.1 with a 29% share, followed by SK Hynix and Kioxia.
- China’s YMTC continues its rapid growth, expanding its share to 13%, closing the gap with SanDisk and Micron.
Samsung remained the king of the global SSD market with a 290% market share, followed by SK Hynix with a 18% market share, while Kioxia, Micron, and Sandisk held a 14-13% revenue. But the biggest surprise is that Chinese NAND maker, YMTC, also managed to score a 13% market share, which shows a huge 246% growth year over year. Based on the chart below, it looks like YMTC has managed to claw away a significant portion of NAND revenue from Samsung, SK Hynix, and Kioxia.
YMTC is aiming for an IPO in the Chinese stock market, following the footsteps of CXMT, which is also making headlines for growing its DRAM business in a big way. Both companies are involved in an "Epic expansion" plan which will see the construction of massive production facilities to drive double the wafer output than the current.
While DRAM and NAND segments are doing great due to the AI Hyper-cycle, the global PC market isn't doing that great. IDC reports a 11.3% decline in global PC shipments for 2026, which is expected to remain the same in 2027, and will only start to show signs of healing around 2028-2029, with a formal return anticipated for 2030.
The global PC shipments are expected to drop to around 260 million units, a far cry from the 290+ million units in the previous year.
While higher component prices are affecting the sales of PCs, new platforms are emerging, such as Apple's MacBook Neo, and various Intel Wildcat Lake laptops in designs such as the Dell XPS 13, which aims to be a challenger to the Neo, offering competitive specs.
Qualcomm is also working on its entry-tier Snapdragon C-series for budget users. This shows that the market is adjusting to recent price hikes, but the only real relief will come when the new DRAM/NAND fabs that are being set up across the globe become operational, and that won't happen until 2029-2030.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
