YMTC Is Now Third in NAND by Volume, Still Fifth by Revenue
China's YMTC ranked third in NAND by bit shipments in the second quarter of 2026, passing Micron and SanDisk and edging past Kioxia by one place.
AI servers absorbed 48% of NAND demand, China's YMTC takes third (MoneyToday, 2026-08-12)NAND is the chip that holds the photos on a phone and the files on a laptop. It keeps its contents with the power off, and data centers stack it by the rack.
Third by bits, fifth by dollars
This market gets ranked two ways. Bit shipments count how many gigabytes went out the door. Revenue counts what came back for them. When those two rankings split for one company, the price per bit is low. YMTC is third on shipments and fifth on revenue.
One company on the entity list now makes roughly one of every seven bits leaving this market.
Counterpoint Research, 2Q 2026 bit shipments, via Korean press, retrieved 2026-08-12
From 8% to 13% in a year
Counterpoint Research's English quarterly tracker is built on revenue. There, YMTC's share went from 8% in the first quarter of 2025 to 13% in the first quarter of 2026.
Global NAND memory market share, quarterly (Counterpoint Research, 2026-06-08)In that same first quarter Samsung led revenue with 29% and SK hynix followed with 18%. The distance between counting bits and counting dollars is where YMTC's rank moves.
Four years on the list
The US Commerce Department put YMTC on its entity list on December 15, 2022. It has been building without clean access to American tools and parts ever since. DigiTimes reported that YMTC's first two Wuhan fabs run at about 200,000 wafers a month, and that a third fab adds 50,000 a month in 2027, reaching 100,000 at full tilt. NAND is a physical good. Even with fewer tools to buy, a company that finishes every line it can still puts out more pieces.
What happens when Wuhan's third fab opens in 2027
NAND prices are up this year because AI servers are pulling volume out of the market. Add a supplier outside the export-control perimeter into that, and the ceiling on price gets pressed down. What Samsung and SK hynix are getting paid right now may not hold as long as the current run suggests. So far, though, YMTC is not the one setting the price. It is the one shipping cheap volume. If next quarter's tracker puts it inside the top three on revenue, it has started collecting a real price. If it stays fourth or lower, volume is still all it has.
- China's YMTC took third place in NAND for the first time, with a 14% share of bit shipments in the second quarter.
- A company on the US entity list for three and a half years now ships more bits than Micron or SanDisk.
- By revenue it still ranks fifth. It ships more and earns less.
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Sources
- Original Jukan (@jukan05) · 2026-08-12
- 2Q shipment ranking MoneyToday · 2026-08-12 · citing Counterpoint Research
- Quarterly revenue tracker Counterpoint Research · updated 2026-06-08
- Capacity reporting DigiTimes · 2026-04-15
- Entity list addition DigiTimes · 2022-12-16
Retrieved 2026-08-12. The 2Q bit-shipment shares come from Korean press citing Counterpoint Research; the revenue figures are Counterpoint's own English page for 1Q 2026.
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