Raw storage sales grow 22% to $241b in the year to September 2025

Nothing defines the ITC industry’s connections to Moore’s law more than the evolution of the raw storage market, which is made up of the three components (DRAM memory, NAND solid state disc chips and Hard Disc Drives (HDD). En bloc these saw a substantial decline in spending from 2021 to 2023, before returning to its exponential growth. In the year to the end of September 2025 sales grew by 22% to reach $241 billion. Of the three components NAND saw the strongest growth (29% up to $62 billion), followed closely by DRAM (28% growth to $144 billion). Sales of HDDs grew by 18% to reach $35 billion in the year. See my Figure above for the annual sales of each, complete with a conservative forecast for 2026.
Between them South Korean companies Samsung and SK Hynix are the stand-out leaders, with a combined market share of 50% in the year to the end of September (see my Figure above). The HDD market is dominated by just two companies – Western Digital (WD) and Seagate. WD completed its spin-off of its NAND business to re-establish SanDisk as a separate company in February 2025, having acquired it back in 2016. Samsung and Micron dominated the NAND market with a 72% share between them in the year, while SK Hynix and Samsung held a combined 62% share of the DRAM market.

Looking at the shipped capacity of these devices (see my Figure above, where I use a logarithmic scale to account for the significant differences of the three types), the downward dip from 2021 to 2023 has been replaced by a steady rise. The total shipped capacity in the year to the end of September 2025 was 1.4 Zettabytes – up 6% on the previous year. The increasing deployment of AI processing is a major driver of this growth – especially for DRAM and NAND.

Looking at the nationality of raw storage suppliers (see my Figure above), South Korea overtook the USA in 2017 and accounted for 50% of spending in the year to the end of September 2025. This makes US ITC suppliers increasingly dependent on South Korean vendors for these devices – one reason why their government has avoided implementing high trade tariffs.