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TrendForce’s latest analysis of the enterprise SSD market reveals that rapid adoption of AI Agent services and strong procurement demand from CSPs drove enterprise SSD revenue to another record high in 1Q26. Industry revenue surged 86.1% QoQ, surpassing US$18.46 billion.
TrendForce notes that the market experienced an exceptionally severe supply-demand imbalance during the quarter. Inventory levels at major suppliers fell to historic lows, while production output lagged far behind order growth. Vendors are aggressively raising prices to maximize profitability amid tight supply, driving enterprise SSD contract prices up by approximately 80% during the quarter.
Samsung demonstrated strong supply resilience in 1Q26. Although production growth was unable to fully satisfy CSP demand, which nearly doubled during the quarter, the company significantly expanded output through the broad migration of its product portfolio to 236-layer NAND technology.
With support from large-scale shipments of 176-layer QLC products, Samsung generated $7.05 billion in enterprise SSD revenue during the quarter, representing a 92.8% QoQ increase.
The SK hynix Group also delivered strong results as it leveraged the complementary strengths of SK hynix and its subsidiary Solidigm. Combined enterprise SSD revenue reached $4.64 billion in 1Q26.
Solidigm continued to ramp shipments of QLC-based products, while SK hynix expanded deliveries of its 176-layer TLC solutions. This enabled the group to capture growing AI inference-related demand. Looking ahead, Solidigm is accelerating the transition to 240-layer NAND technology, while SK hynix has already begun development of next-generation 375-layer TLC products.
Micron aggressively reallocated capacity away from smartphone and channel markets toward enterprise SSDs during the past year. The benefits of this strategy are now clearly reflected in its financial performance. Micron’s enterprise SSD revenue surged to almost $3.09 billion in 1Q26, supported by a significant increase in supply allocation.
Kioxia benefited from the qualification and volume ramp of its 218-layer products among North American customers, as well as growing market share among server OEMs. Quarterly revenue rose to approximately $2.22 billion.
The company is currently expanding validation efforts for its 245TB QLC enterprise SSD products in an effort to further accelerate shipments in the second half of the year.
SanDisk also delivered solid performance during the quarter, particularly in the high-capacity storage segment. With bit shipments increasing by approximately 20%, enterprise SSD revenue reached nearly $1.47 billion.
SanDisk’s QLC enterprise SSD products have entered volume shipment amid an industry-wide shortage of high-capacity QLC storage solutions. As customer qualification programs continue to be completed, TrendForce expects QLC products to become a major driver of the company’s future revenue growth, helping address the expanding storage requirements of AI training datasets.
TrendForce emphasizes that SSDs are no longer merely data repositories. Increasingly, they are becoming critical components that support computational workloads.
From Micron’s SLC SSD initiatives to Kioxia’s XL-Flash technology, suppliers are pursuing different approaches to address the storage architecture requirements of Agentic AI systems. The capacity limitations and rising costs of DRAM are forcing the market to adopt high-performance SSDs as an alternative tier within the memory hierarchy as AI Agent workloads continue to grow. This architectural shift is expected to provide sustained momentum for the enterprise SSD market throughout 2026.
