Kioxia $285A
As of June 15, 2026, memory stock performance shows Kioxia up approximately 744% YTD, SK Hynix up about 230%, and Samsung Electronics up about 183%, with Kioxia achieving a rise of about 3.2 times that of SK Hynix and about 4.1 times that of Samsung Electronics.
Amid the first wave of AI memory demand centered on HBM/DRAM from 2024–2025 and the second wave centered on NAND/Enterprise SSD from 2025–2026 onward, Samsung and SK Hynix have focused their capital expenditures on HBM, relatively suppressing and postponing the development and ramp-up of leading-edge NAND, whereas Kioxia, as a pure-play NAND company, is positioned to fully capitalize on the second wave. Structural advantages such as cost competitiveness from its joint venture with SanDisk/Western Digital, advancements in BiCS technology, and differentiation through high-performance NAND tailored for AI inference are believed to be the key factors behind the performance gap.
Kioxia has nearly sold out its NAND/SSD supply for the full year of 2026.
In its May fiscal results, it updated to record-high profits, with a bullish forecast for the June quarter of operating income around 1.3 trillion yen.
At the Investor Day on June 2, it upwardly revised its flash demand CAGR from 20% to 22%, reflecting AI inference demand.