Memory crisis opens door for new SSD manufacturer

SSD prices have been steadily falling for the past fifteen years, making fast storage a standard feature in almost every laptop. However, things changed dramatically with the AI boom of 2026. As data centers have been buying up massive amounts of memory, SSDs, and even hard drives for AI, the price of memory and, consequently, laptops has skyrocketed. In the search for solutions, even the largest laptop manufacturers have found themselves struggling to supply components.

This crisis environment has created ideal conditions for the emergence of new players in the memory media market. The Chinese company Yangtze Memory Technologies, better known by its acronym YMTC, has recently seized the opportunity. Founded ten years ago, the company was almost completely unknown in the notebook market, as established names from the US, South Korea and Japan, such as Samsung, Kioxia and Western Digital, held the lead. However, with these manufacturers' supplies dwindling, the balance of power is changing rapidly.

The first test of the YMTC drive in a Lenovo laptop was conducted as part of the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL test. The built-in 512 GB drive uses the M.2 2242 format and operates over the NVMe PCIe 4.0 interface. The test results showed that its write and transfer speeds are average for a drive used in a business or office laptop.

The sequential read speed stopped at 3,950 MB/s, and the write speed at 2,514 MB/s, while the results in random reading of small files (4K test) were also not outstanding. Despite the average results, the fact that the Chinese SSD was used by the largest PC manufacturer in the world suggests that 2026 will bring YMTC's definitive breakthrough into the wider consumer market.