The bottleneck in NAND flash memory is always the same: stacked cell layers per die, converted into bits per wafer and then into cost per terabyte. It is the metric that separates volume leaders from challengers, and it is the one on which Counterpoint Research now places a Chinese firm above both Micron and Kioxia in shipments.
Counterpoint Research, which tracks the NAND segment separately from the broader memory chip market, found that the segment is catching a demand lift from artificial intelligence workloads. The same AI-driven pull has already moved through the DRAM segment, the faster, costlier working-memory tier that processors draw on directly during training and inference. NAND, which holds datasets and model checkpoints at lower cost and higher latency, is now following that trajectory, according to the firm's analysis.
Micron is the largest American NAND producer. Kioxia, the Japanese maker that emerged from Toshiba's memory business, has long held competitive shipment volumes globally. Both now sit below the Chinese manufacturer in Counterpoint's rankings.