China's YMTC Now Ranks Third in Global NAND Chips, Files for Shanghai IPO

China's YMTC has climbed to third place globally in NAND flash memory shipments, and it's now lining up a Shanghai IPO to fund the next stage of that push.

According to Counterpoint Research data reported by the South China Morning Post, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation captured 14% of global NAND bit shipments in the second quarter of 2026, edging past Japan's Kioxia. Samsung Electronics held the top spot at 25% and SK Hynix, including its Solidigm subsidiary, was second at 22%. YMTC's shipments were up 22% year over year and 5% from the prior quarter, SCMP reported, driven by domestic electronics demand and ramped-up production of its latest 3D NAND chips.

South Korean outlet mk.co.kr, citing the same Counterpoint data released August 24, noted YMTC's share was just 4.8% back in 2021. That's nearly tripling in five years. The outlet also reported YMTC's monthly wafer capacity currently sits at 200,000 wafers and is set to rise to 300,000 wafers per month next year.

The revenue gap that won't close

Bit-shipment share isn't the same as making money. YMTC ranked fifth globally in NAND revenue for the quarter, trailing both Kioxia and U.S.-based Micron Technology, according to SCMP and confirmed independently by eetimes.

Why the gap? YMTC's product mix leans heavy on cheap consumer gear, laptops, phones, and it has a thin footprint in enterprise solid-state drives, the pricier storage that data centers actually want. Enterprise SSDs made up 48% of global NAND bits shipped in the second quarter, according to Counterpoint data cited by both eetimes and ZeroHedge, nearly double the 26% share from a year earlier. Counterpoint projects server SSDs will account for more than half of all NAND bits shipped by the end of 2026, as AI workloads shift from training models to running inference, which chews through storage for fast data retrieval.

YMTC says it plans to grow its enterprise SSD share in the second half of 2026, per eetimes. Whether that happens fast enough to catch the AI storage wave, or whether Samsung and SK Hynix have already locked up that high-margin business, is the open question.

The IPO push

Bloomberg reported on August 19 that YMTC's parent company completed China's pre-listing "tutoring" process, the mandatory governance and accounting review Chinese firms go through before filing for a domestic share sale. DigiTimes confirmed the same milestone on August 20, describing it as a "key stage" of the pre-IPO process.

This follows the playbook of YMTC's sister company, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's DRAM and high-bandwidth memory maker. CXMT's IPO last month raised close to $10 billion and made it China's most valuable listed company, surpassing Tencent, according to ZeroHedge and Bloomberg-sourced reporting via Bloomingbit. Bloomingbit reports YMTC's own listing is expected in the first half of 2027, though no filing date has been confirmed by regulators.

CXMT and YMTC are dubbed the "Two Changs" of China's chip industry, per eetimes. Together they represent Beijing's clearest bid yet to build a self-sufficient memory supply chain independent of Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

The technology and the roadblock

YMTC's edge comes from Xtacking, a hybrid-bonding architecture that separates memory-cell manufacturing from control-circuit manufacturing, then bonds the two together, according to Bloomingbit. Data-transfer speeds have jumped from roughly 800 MT/s in early versions to 3,600 MT/s in the current Xtacking 4.0, with capacity up to 2 terabytes. Counterpoint reports YMTC has begun mass production of 267-layer 3D NAND chips and is developing designs beyond 300 layers.

The real constraint, and it's one Beijing can't engineer around: YMTC has been on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List since 2022, according to eetimes, which restricts its access to the most advanced lithography tools. That's the same list CXMT sits on. An IPO raises cash. It doesn't hand YMTC an ASML machine.

Shipment share and layer-count records are real technical achievements, not just propaganda. China's chip industry has genuinely narrowed the gap in NAND specifically, according to mk.co.kr, which quoted industry watchers saying the NAND technology gap between China and South Korea "has already disappeared." Whether that claim holds for the higher-margin enterprise SSD market YMTC is chasing is far less settled, and Samsung and SK Hynix aren't standing still either.

The IPO filing itself, expected sometime before mid-2027 based on Bloomingbit's reporting, will be the next concrete marker. Whether U.S. export controls tighten further in response, or whether YMTC secures workaround suppliers for advanced lithography, remains unresolved.