It is called Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), a Chinese company growing fast in a crucial corner of the chip market, to the point that it has just overtaken US giant Micron Technology.

The Chinese company YMTC has just beaten Micron and Kioxia in NAND chip shipments

According to data compiled by Counterpoint Research and published by CNBC, YMTC ranked third worldwide for NAND memory shipments in the second quarter of 2026, trailing South Korean rivals Samsung and SK Hynix but ahead of America’s Micron and Japan’s Kioxia. (NAND memory sales account for roughly a quarter of Micron’s revenue.)

This particular type of semiconductor stands out for its ability to retain data even when the devices it is installed in are switched off. One example comes from the SSDs in computers: when you save a photo or a file, that data is stored in the NAND. NAND chips are, in effect, genuine data-storage tools.

That said, they tend to be slower than DRAM memory, which operates at far higher speeds and carries a significantly higher cost. In Micron’s case, DRAM weighs much more heavily on revenue than NAND, at roughly three-quarters of the total.

The fact that Chinese company YMTC nonetheless beat Micron marks an important milestone for China itself. To be precise, YMTC took third place in chip shipments, capturing a market share of 14% in the months between April and June. It thereby leapfrogged Japan’s Kioxia, which it had already beaten last year before being overtaken again in the months that followed.

The group’s next target: a 15% market share

MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, commented on the news that YMTC’s shipments had beaten those of Micron and Kioxia, stressing his optimism about the group’s growth prospects:

«We expect YMTC to widen its lead further in 2027 and 2028. From that standpoint, the fact that YMTC reached third place this quarter carries significant weight in the competitive landscape.»

The group’s next target, according to Hwang, is reaching a 15% market share, which represents the minimum threshold needed to allow a memory maker to self-fund the capital expenditure required for future growth, at a time when interest in AI chips is running high.

But YMTC still trails Micron on revenue. The IPO is awaited

One clarification is nonetheless necessary: YMTC beat Micron and Kioxia on the field of shipments, but not on the revenue earned from selling those same NAND chips.

On that point, Counterpoint noted that the Chinese group still sells its semiconductors mostly to companies for consumer applications rather than for data centers, a market expected to absorb half of all available NAND by the end of 2026.

The fact that Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) beat Micron is nevertheless significant, especially considering that the company has filed a plan with the Shanghai Stock Exchange to go public, a market that in recent weeks has witnessed the fever surrounding the IPO of CXMT, a company focused instead on DRAM.

In the second quarter, CXMT held a 7% share of the DRAM market, ranking fourth behind Micron, SK Hynix and market leader Samsung, according to another Counterpoint report released earlier this month.

Counterpoint recalled that both the DRAM and the NAND memory chip markets hit record sales levels in the first quarter, at nearly $100 billion and $46 billion respectively, stressing that AI has become the decisive variable for NAND demand as well.

«With the AI paradigm shifting from training to inference, demand has risen rapidly for storage solutions capable of holding KV cache and datasets while ensuring high speeds and low power consumption,» the report reads.

The outlook is positive: enterprise SSDs (eSSDs, the storage memory of a server or data center) are estimated to absorb more than half of all NAND bits by the end of this year, a factor that has pushed the average selling prices (ASPs) of consumer products to record levels.

Despite its progress in shipments, YMTC still trails Micron and Kioxia in terms of revenue from NAND chips, the research firm noted, since the Chinese maker continues to sell to makers of consumer electronics devices rather than to firms active in professional data-center storage.

Meanwhile, anticipation is building for the launch of its IPO, especially after the fever that erupted over the market debut of fellow chipmaker CXMT, whose shares soared as much as 500% during their first day of trading. YMTC officially began its IPO process on May 19, 2026, filing the paperwork for a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market. No date for its debut has yet been set.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Laura Naka Antonelli on August 13, 2026 as «YMTC, l’azienda cinese dei chip NAND ha appena battuto il colosso USA Micron. Attesa per l’IPO». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.