Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Growing 37.9% in a market up 59.5% cost SK Hynix four points of DRAM share
Counterpoint puts Micron a single point behind SK Hynix in Q2 2026, but the $2.59bn revenue gap narrowed mostly because SK Hynix grew at two-thirds of the market's rate, and the makers outside the Big Three grew faster than either.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Counterpoint Research's Q2 2026 DRAM data puts Micron at roughly 24-25 per cent of the market, one percentage point behind SK Hynix on 25-26 per cent.
- The market itself reached $154.73bn for the quarter, up 59.5 per cent on the prior three months, on AI server demand that outran supply and held contract prices up.
- SK Hynix booked $38.59bn, up 37.9 per cent on the quarter and 214 per cent on the year, the slowest quarterly growth of the three incumbents.
- CXMT, the Chinese maker formerly called ChangXin Memory Technologies, is estimated at 7-10 per cent of the market against about 4 per cent a year ago, concentrated in conventional DRAM rather than HBM.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Being Nvidia's primary memory supplier is exactly what held SK Hynix to 37.9 per cent growth, because HBM sells on negotiated accelerator contracts while the conventional server DRAM around it repriced with the shortage.
- decision Micron's share is bought with capacity it is not giving to consumer-grade parts, so every point of it is a standing wager that AI infrastructure stays the marginal buyer of memory.
- exposure A share table built from revenue in a 59.5 per cent pricing quarter reverses on price alone, which leaves Micron's gain exposed to the first flat contract quarter rather than to any rival's capacity.
- contradiction Counterpoint's 24-25 per cent for Micron sits above the 23.3 per cent its own revenue figures imply, so the widely repeated one-point gap is the friendliest available reading of a $2.59bn distance.
Divide the reported revenues into the reported total and the table tightens differently from the published share ranges: Micron's roughly $36bn is 23.3 per cent of a $154.73bn quarter [1], SK Hynix's $38.59bn is 24.9 per cent [2], and the distance between second and third is $2.59bn, or 1.7 points of the market [3]. Counterpoint's ranges, 24-25 against 25-26, make it a single point [1], which is the flattering version of the same gap.
The arithmetic upstream is the part that moves. A quarter of $154.73bn growing 59.5 per cent came off a base of about $97.0bn [4], and SK Hynix's 37.9 per cent implies roughly $27.98bn in that base period, or 28.8 per cent share, so it surrendered about 3.9 points in three months [5]. Micron's 65.5 per cent implies $21.75bn and 22.4 per cent, a gain of about 0.9 of a point [6]. Of the 4.8 points by which the second-to-third gap closed, some 82 per cent is SK Hynix moving backwards rather than Micron moving up [11]. Growing at 64 per cent of the market's rate [8] is how a company loses share while posting 214 per cent year on year [7].
Or rather, the more interesting version: the fastest-growing block in the table is the unnamed remainder. Subtract the three from the total and $19.16bn is left, against roughly $9.96bn a quarter earlier, a 92 per cent gain that beat Micron's 65.5 per cent [7]. Counterpoint puts CXMT at 7-10 per cent from 4 per cent a year ago, concentrated in conventional DRAM rather than HBM [8], and the Big Three's combined share at about 87 per cent from 94 [9]; the revenue lines come out at 87.6 per cent [10].
SK Hynix's concentration in high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's accelerators [10] is what kept it out of the repricing. Contract prices stayed elevated because AI server demand outran supply [12], and the conventional server DRAM that Micron prioritised over lower-margin consumer parts [11] is what repriced hardest, which inverts the trade that carried SK Hynix to second place. The source breaks out no HBM pricing, so that read rests on the growth spread alone.
Which is the caution worth holding onto. A revenue share is a scoreboard of what each seller could charge in one quarter, not of wafers in the ground: Micron's 0.9 of a point sits on price, the data carries no bit shipments [12], and the source does not say whether Q2 2026 means calendar quarters or the companies' own fiscal ones [13]. Over a year the move is larger than one quarter's shuffling, since Micron's fivefold gain against SK Hynix's 214 per cent takes it from about 59 per cent of SK Hynix's revenue to about 93 [9].
The view here is that the server-DRAM allocation is being rewarded, modestly, and that a flat contract-price quarter in which Micron's bits fail to grow would show the gain was the market's doing rather than Boise's. The counter-thesis is respectable: if HBM holds the margin and the Nvidia socket, SK Hynix would trade 3.9 points of commodity share for it again, and revenue share of a repricing commodity is the wrong scoreboard for that bet. The Counterpoint numbers settle neither, because they contain prices and no volumes.
What to watch
- Whether DRAM contract prices hold into the next quarter, since Micron's share gain was measured in revenue and the data carries no bit shipments.
- Counterpoint's next reading on CXMT, and whether the 92 per cent quarter outside the Big Three repeats or proves to be one restocking cycle.
- Whether SK Hynix's HBM pricing resets upward at the next Nvidia contract cycle, which would move the second-place gap without any capacity changing hands.