Global semiconductor shipments of NAND flash memory saw a significant shift in the second quarter of 2025 as artificial intelligence workloads moved toward inference. Enterprise solid-state drives now represent the largest portion of this market. According to data from Counterpoint Research, these drives accounted for 48 percent of all global NAND bit shipments during the April-to-June period. This figure marks a sharp increase from the 26 percent share recorded a year earlier.
Consumer products struggled with supply shortages as manufacturers tightened their output. The resulting scarcity pushed industry revenue up fivefold compared to the second quarter of 2025. This price surge reached a record high level. Samsung Electronics maintained its position as the market leader, retaining a 25 percent share of global NAND bit shipments. SK hynix followed in second place with a 22 percent share, while China’s YMTC moved past Kioxia to take third place with a 14 percent share. Micron rounded out the top five with a 13 percent share.
The rise of AI is driving this demand. Inference workloads require storage that can handle large datasets and key-value caches with high speed and power efficiency. This preference for premium, high-capacity storage is pushing enterprise SSDs to account for more than half of all NAND bit shipments by the end of the year. The supply shortage has also caused average selling prices for consumer NAND products to hit a record high.
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Company Strategies and Competition
Manufacturers are adjusting their production strategies based on these new realities. Samsung Electronics reduced its NAND shipments to prioritize the production of higher-margin DRAM products. This move highlights the difficulty of balancing limited manufacturing capacity across different memory types. SK hynix saw its shipments rise with help from its subsidiary Solidigm, which recorded a 40 percent increase in bit shipments from the previous quarter.
YMTC also benefited from the supply crunch. The company increased shipments by 22 percent year-over-year and 5 percent sequentially. It has expanded supplies to domestic customers and is mass-producing 267-layer 3D NAND products. The firm is also developing technology with more than 300 layers based on its proprietary Xtacking architecture.
Competition is becoming more complex as server demand grows. Kioxia now supplies more than 30 percent of its shipments to the server market. However, higher prices for these servers have slowed customer purchases, allowing YMTC to overtake Kioxia in shipment volume. Micron remains a top-five supplier by volume but trails YMTC in revenue. This disparity exists because YMTC’s product portfolio is still focused on consumer NAND, with a smaller share of high-priced data center eSSDs.
