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April marks the fifth straight month where Taiwan's listed semiconductor cohort has posted broad YoY growth, and the composition of the gains is becoming harder to ignore for anyone tracking memory. DigiTimes' monthly tracker shows 173 of 238 listed names (73%) up year-over-year and 139 (58%) up sequentially, with memory makers, AI server assemblers, and advanced packaging houses doing the heavy lifting. Silicon wafer suppliers and a chunk of fabless lagged.
The memory line item is the one that matters for storage readers. Nanya Technology (TWSE: 2408) posted NT$25.49B in April revenue, up 717% YoY and 40% MoM, a record. That's not a typo; a year ago Nanya was barely clearing NT$3B in a soft DRAM market. Macronix (TWSE: 2337) closed Q1 with NAND revenue up 382% YoY. Samsung (KRX: 005930) announced MLC NAND end-of-life back in March 2025 with final shipments hitting in June 2026. Kioxia, SK hynix, and Micron (NASDAQ: MU) still ship some MLC but only to existing customers with no interest in scaling. Macronix, traditionally an embedded and high-reliability shop, has been one of the clearest beneficiaries in the 4Gb-32Gb SLC/MLC low-density window and has shifted from quarterly to monthly pricing. Winbond (TWSE: 2344) cleared Q1 at NT$38.25B, +91% YoY, fabs fully loaded. TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) at NT$410.73B in April, +17.5% YoY, gives you the foundry context that drags the whole AI accelerator and HBM stack behind it.
This is the supercycle that TrendForce and Counterpoint were calling six months ago, now landing in real monthly prints. Suppliers are routing wafer capacity to HBM, where Objective Analysis' Jim Handy estimates each HBM byte consumes roughly three times the silicon of standard DDR, meaning a 10% HBM mix share eats something closer to 30% of available wafers. The resulting squeeze on conventional DDR5, DDR4, eMMC, UFS, and client/enterprise NAND is showing up as price inversions and CSP long-term agreements locking up 2026 supply. Morgan Stanley has separately warned that every 10% rise in memory pricing translates to roughly 45-150 bps of gross margin pressure on hardware OEMs absorbing those costs.
The practical translation for SSD buyers: the parts of the supply chain that build your drive's NAND and DRAM cache are running flat-out at record pricing. TrendForce sees tight supply persisting through 2026, with meaningful enterprise SSD capacity expansion unlikely before late 2027 or 2028, though it also notes mainstream NAND price-hike momentum may be slowing and could go sideways if demand softens. If you've been waiting for client SSD MSRPs to drop back to 2024 levels, the supply chain data says elevated pricing for a while yet.
Sources used:
- DigiTimes monthly tracker (May 13, 2026)
- Nanya April 2026 revenue release via MarketScreener (May 4, 2026)
- TSMC April 2026 6-K SEC filing (May 8, 2026)
- TrendForce on Macronix NAND Q1 2026 (April 28, 2026)
- TrendForce on MLC NAND niche / Samsung EOL timing (January 7, 2026)
- DigiTimes on Winbond 1Q26 results (May 5, 2026)
- TrendForce 2Q26 memory contract price outlook (March 31, 2026)
- NetworkWorld on Handy/Objective Analysis HBM wafer math (January 20, 2026)
- Morgan Stanley memory supercycle note via Global Semi Research substack (Dec 2025)
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