As investments in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers expanded, the enterprise solid-state drive (eSSD) market more than doubled in the second quarter from the prior quarter. Samsung Electronics kept the top spot with a 35.1% share, while U.S.-based Micron, led by high-capacity products, posted the highest sales growth rate among major players.
According to market researcher TrendForce on the 1st, the combined sales of the top five global eSSD makers in the second quarter were estimated at $37.59 billion (about 51.5 trillion won), up 103.6% from the previous quarter. Demand for data center storage rose with the expansion of Generative AI and cloud infrastructure, and product prices also climbed.
eSSD is an enterprise storage device used in data centers and servers. It is used to store the large volumes of data generated during AI training and inference, and as investments in AI servers increase, demand for high-capacity, high-performance products is also rising.
Samsung Electronics' second-quarter eSSD sales were about $14.354 billion (about 19.7 trillion won), keeping the No. 1 position with a 35.1% share. Increased shipments of 176-layer quad-level cell (QLC) products and a higher share of high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0-based products lifted results. QLC raises capacity by storing 4 bits of data in a single NAND flash cell.
TrendForce said that as major North American cloud service providers (CSPs) transition SSD interfaces in data centers from PCIe 4.0 to 5.0, Samsung Electronics, which can supply both DRAM and NAND flash, has established itself as a key memory and eSSD supplier for server customers.
SK hynix, including its subsidiary Solidigm, posted second-quarter eSSD sales of at least $8.631 billion (about 11.8 trillion won), holding second place. Although this was up 85.9% from the prior quarter, its share fell by 2.0 percentage points to 21.1% from 23.1%.
Micron's second-quarter sales were about $6.983 billion (about 9.6 trillion won), up 126.3% from the previous quarter, the highest growth rate among the top five players. Its share rose 1.7 percentage points to 17.1% from 15.4%, ranking third. As the AI market expanded, it concentrated production capacity on eSSDs and high bandwidth memory (HBM), while shipments of high-capacity, 232-layer QLC-based products jumped.
Kioxia ranked fourth with second-quarter eSSD sales of $4.64 billion (about 6.4 trillion won). SanDisk placed fifth with about $2.98 billion (about 4.1 trillion won).
TrendForce projected that eSSD demand will remain high in the third quarter, buoyed by the spread of Generative AI agent services, CSP investments in data centers, and shipments of Nvidia GB series AI server racks. However, it noted that expanded production by Chinese companies and growth in China's cloud market were variables that could reshape future competitive dynamics.