2025-2026 Storage Industry Dynamics: Tightening Supply and Technological Breakthroughs in Parallel
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the global storage industry presents a situation where expectations of tight supply and technological innovation go hand in hand. Leading enterprises such as Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, as well as manufacturers including Lianyun Technology and TeamGroup, have taken frequent actions, laying the foundation for the industry pattern in 2026.
Sumit Sadana, Executive Vice President of Micron Technology, pointed out that the supply of DRAM will become more severe in 2026. On one hand, the amount of wafers consumed by HBM is three times that of traditional DRAM, and the capacity tilt of the three major original manufacturers has led to limited capacity of general-purpose DRAM. On the other hand, the cost and time cost of building new DRAM wafer fabs have increased, making it difficult to expand production on a large scale in the short term. At the same time, Micron plans to ship HBM4 in small batches in 2026, aiming to increase its HBM market share. It will also extend the production of DDR4 to meet demand and explore higher pricing in the automotive DRAM field.
Recently, SK Hynix’s stock price exceeded 500,000 won, setting a 25-year high. Institutions have successively raised the target price to 550,000 – 600,000 won. Its performance growth is due to the expansion of AI data center storage demand from HBM to the entire storage field, and the conservative investment of storage suppliers has made it difficult to increase short-term capacity. It is a foregone conclusion that supply will be in short supply in the future. The company’s operating profit in the third quarter is expected to increase by 71% year-on-year, reaching 12 trillion won.
Lianyun Technology achieved outstanding performance in the third quarter of 2025. Its non-net profit in the first three quarters increased by 141.8% year-on-year, and the growth rate of non-net profit in the third quarter alone was as high as 234.6%. This is due to the growth of downstream demand and the increase in the proportion of high-margin product revenue. At the same time, its product matrix of storage controller chips continues to improve, and the new generation of PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0 and UFS series controller chips will be put into mass production or launched on the market one after another.
In terms of technological breakthroughs, the yield rate of Samsung Electronics’ 4nm process HBM4 logic chip exceeds 90%, and it is currently supplying samples to NVIDIA and AMD. Half of the capacity of the 4nm production line is used for the production of this chip, which has potential advantages over TSMC’s 5nm solution. Synopsys has completed the verification of LPDDR6 IP in TSMC’s N2P process, achieving a bandwidth of 86GB/s, and the speed has increased by more than 30% compared with LPDDR5. It is expected to be put into commercial use in 2026. TeamGroup has launched the PCIe 5.0 SSD T-FORCE Z54E, which adopts Phison’s 6nm process E28 controller. Its sequential read and write speeds reach 14.8GB/s and 14GB/s respectively, and the power consumption is as low as 5W, with significantly improved performance and energy efficiency.