The share difference is only 3%! Samsung and SK Hynix “fight” in the enterprise SSD market

[ Gearbest Technology News]As the demand for artificial intelligence data centers expands, the enterprise-level solid-state drive market is becoming a new battlefield for memory chip giants. In addition to competing in the HBM field, Samsung and SK Hynix are accelerating their battle for market dominance of enterprise-class SSDs. Especially in the context of the rapid growth in the proportion of SSDs based on QLC (four-layer cells), it is expected that market competition will further intensify this year as Samsung officially expands shipments.

According to industry data, global NAND flash memory sales are expected to more than double as the enterprise SSD market grows this year. Previously, the growth of DRAM was the most prominent in the memory semiconductor market. However, as the AI ​​industry expands from training to inference, the scale of intermediate operation results (KV cache) that the AI ​​model needs to process is rapidly expanding. When the capacity of the HBM mounted on the AI ​​accelerator reaches its limit, these caches will eventually be transferred to SSD. The industry believes that this change, combined with the growth of the AI ​​inference market, is stimulating demand for enterprise-level SSDs. Not only DRAM, the demand market base for high-capacity NAND is also expanding.

According to data from market research organization TrendForce, in the fourth quarter of last year, Samsung’s enterprise-level SSD market share was 33.8%, and SK Hynix (including subsidiary Solidigm) was 30.2%. In the same period last year, the shares of the two companies were 35.1% and 26.8% respectively, and the gap narrowed from 8.3 percentage points to 3.6 percentage points.

In terms of revenue, Samsung’s enterprise-class SSD revenue in the fourth quarter of last year was US$3.66 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49.7%. However, SK hynix is ​​catching up with the leaders with a higher growth rate of over 75%, achieving revenue of US$3.26 billion. During the same period, the total revenue growth rate of the world's top five enterprise-level SSD suppliers was 51.7%. Samsung did not reach this level, while SK Hynix exceeded it by a large margin.

SK hynix has quickly established a foothold in the high-capacity QLC enterprise SSD market through its subsidiary Solidigm and has achieved the fastest growth as a result. Solidigm is an SSD subsidiary established in the United States after SK Hynix acquired Intel's NAND business unit in 2021. It has long cultivated competitiveness in the QLC enterprise-class SSD field based on 3D NAND technology.

Although Samsung has the largest production capacity in the overall enterprise-level SSD market, it is relatively conservative in terms of mass production and supply of QLC products. In the past, it mainly responded to demand with TLC NAND. TrendForce predicts that QLC SSD will account for approximately 30% of the entire enterprise SSD market this year. Samsung has completed the layout of the 176-layer QLC enterprise-class SSD product line at the end of last year, and shipments are expected to increase significantly this year. At the same time, Samsung is also accelerating its conversion to the 280-level 9th ​​generation V-NAND mass production line.

Samsung QLC 9th Generation V-NAND

Analysts pointed out that Samsung’s previously delayed V9 286-layer process development is expected to be completed at the beginning of this year and will be used in QLC enterprise-class SSDs for AI servers, and the proportion of V9 will continue to expand before the end of the year. SK Hynix also plans to upgrade the existing NAND production line to a process of more than 300 layers starting this year, and officially launch large-scale mass production centered on enterprise-level SSD demand.

The industry predicts that based on the substantial growth of the global enterprise SSD market last year, revenue next year is expected to more than double this year. Precedence Research, another market research company, predicts that the global AI storage market will grow at an average annual rate of 24.4% from US$35.95 billion last year to approximately US$255.24 billion in 2034.