Who makes NAND flash? The five big makers, and why China is pushing in

Five companies account for nearly 88% of global NAND flash revenue. NAND is the kind of memory that stores data even when power is off. That group is starting to change. China's CXMT, already the country's fastest-growing DRAM maker, is preparing to make NAND for the first time. SK Hynix's US flash-memory unit, Solidigm, is considering its first US factory.

NAND is used in phones, laptops, and the solid-state drives that store data in AI servers. It differs from DRAM, the other main type of memory. DRAM is faster, but it loses its data when the power goes out.

DRAM and high-bandwidth memory remained tight through 2026. NAND prices have risen as well, as manufacturers shifted more production toward higher-priced DRAM and HBM. Most of the leading companies make both NAND and DRAM.

The five companies that make it

The ranking below is by NAND revenue in the second quarter of 2026, from TrendForce, whose top five saw combined sales rise 77% from the prior quarter as AI server demand and higher prices lifted the industry.

Samsung has led NAND for years and still does, and the company also makes DRAM and the high-bandwidth memory that sits beside AI chips, so its flash business rides inside a much larger electronics maker. There is no US-listed way to own Samsung directly. Its NAND wafers come out of fabs in Korea and in Xi'an, China.

SK Hynix (SKHY) is the world's second-largest NAND maker once you include Solidigm, the US unit built from the flash and solid-state drive business SK Hynix bought from Intel in a deal that started in 2020. The Korean parent trades in Seoul as 000660, and a US ADR trades under SKHY. Solidigm's only factory today is a single fab in Dalian, China, which is why the company is now looking at building in the United States.

Micron (MU) is the one big memory maker headquartered in the United States, in Boise, Idaho, and the only company in the group that combines a major NAND business with a major DRAM business and trades as a US domestic stock. In the second quarter Micron passed Kioxia to take third place, with the fastest growth of the five as its share climbed to 15.1%. Micron makes both DRAM and NAND, with much of its flash coming out of Singapore.

Kioxia is the old Toshiba memory business. Toshiba invented NAND flash in the 1980s, then spun the unit out and sold it to a group led by Bain Capital. Kioxia went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2024, under the ticker 285A. The company builds its chips in Japan through a long-running joint venture with SanDisk. The two share the same factories, then compete to sell what comes out of them.

SanDisk (SNDK) is the newest name on the list. Western Digital spun the flash business off into a separate company in February 2025, and SanDisk has traded on the Nasdaq ever since. As a pure-play flash company, SanDisk is more directly exposed to changes in NAND prices than its diversified rivals.

China wants into both kinds of memory at once

The list above is the established order. What changed in 2026 is that China's two big memory makers started crossing into each other's markets, and into the Koreans' as well.

YMTC is China's largest NAND maker. By bit shipments the company has climbed into the world's top three, at about 14% by Counterpoint's count. That was enough to pass Kioxia. By revenue YMTC ranks lower, around fifth, because its mix is mostly consumer drives, not the high-priced data-center SSDs that earn the most. This year YMTC began sending low-power DRAM samples to some customers, a step into DRAM, and the company is raising billions to keep chasing Samsung and SK Hynix. Going the other way, CXMT, the DRAM champion, is now setting up a research and production line for NAND at a new plant in Beijing. Korean coverage calls the pair China's twin stars, and the line between their markets is starting to blur.

Neither is public, so there is no share to buy, and the near-term threat is easy to overstate. CXMT's NAND program is still at the research stage, and Reuters said it was unclear whether the project would reach mass production. The reason the move gets attention anyway is how fast CXMT grew in DRAM, where Korean reporting put its share at about 9.5% in the second quarter, up from 7.6% in the first. CXMT has not behaved like a company trying to win on price, quoting Apple higher than the Koreans did and raising what CXMT charges Huawei. A sold-out DRAM maker moving into NAND is looking for more customers, not a price war.

Where the chips get made is starting to move

Almost every NAND fab today sits in South Korea, Japan, China, or Singapore. That map is beginning to shift toward the United States, and Solidigm is the clearest example. Korean outlets reported that a first American plant would end the company's reliance on its single Dalian site and cut its exposure to US tariffs and to export controls on the equipment shipped into China, with upstate New York the leading candidate. Nothing has been confirmed.

Solidigm would not be SK Hynix's first US bet. The parent is already building a packaging plant in Indiana and is in talks with Intel about memory production in Ohio. The hard part is people. American fabs are opening faster than the trained workers to run them, a shortage both Samsung and Micron have flagged, and any new NAND plant would compete for the same short pool of technicians.

For a US investor, the practical shape of the market is simple. Micron and SanDisk are the two you can own as ordinary US stocks. SK Hynix is reachable through the SKHY ADR, and Kioxia trades in Tokyo. Samsung, YMTC, and CXMT have no US-listed line at all. The prices behind all of it have been rising, which is the same story driving the broader run-up in chip prices in 2026.