2026 U.S. Stock Market Surges on Storage Sector, Sparking Investor Anxiety

Making money in A-shares proves that you have ability, fortune, courage, skill, vision, insight, and patience.

Making money in U.S. stocks only proves that you put money into U.S. stocks.

This is the situation most U.S. stock traders find themselves in as of 2026.

Those who quietly bought U.S. storage stocks and casually uninstalled the app to take it easy one day logged back in to find their account had multiplied several times over.

A-shares, spurred by the momentum in U.S. markets, are also seeing storage stocks surge.

Meanwhile, crypto enthusiasts have shifted from discussing memes and altcoins to talking about the U.S. stock market: "I live in fear of rising U.S. stocks and falling BTC."

A new user in the group chat asks: Why is it so easy to make money in the U.S. stock market?

The capital主线 of the global market in 2026 is clearly storage.

Sun Yuchen was among the first to advocate for the storage sector at the end of 2025.

Netizens have calculated that if you bought U.S. stocks in the memory sector at the moment Sun Yuchen made his call,

If you bought Micron, you're currently up +222%; if you bought Seagate, you're currently up +256%; if you bought Western Digital, you're currently up +280%; if you bought SanDisk, you're currently up +515%.

If you had invested 5 million yuan in SanDisk stock exactly one year ago, you would now own 150 million yuan.

What exactly is storage?

Storage chips are components in computers and smartphones responsible for storing data. There are two types: DRAM, which handles short-term memory and temporarily holds data while programs are running; and NAND, which handles long-term memory and stores your phone’s photos and files. When choosing between a 128GB or 256GB phone, that capacity refers to NAND storage.

Globally, fewer than five manufacturers can produce both of these items.

The stocks of these five companies have risen as follows over the past year:

SanDisk, a longtime manufacturer of USB drives and solid-state drives, spun off from Western Digital in February 2025, with its stock price peaking at 22 times its original value.

Micron, a cyclical stock shunned by fund managers for a decade, has surged over 550% in one year, with its gross margin rising from 18% to 56%. Apple’s gross margin is around 43%, already considered the pinnacle of profitability in the tech industry—Micron now exceeds Apple.

SK Hynix rose 123% this year. Samsung rose 94%.

Seagate and Western Digital are both at all-time highs.

Then comes South Korea.

Samsung and SK Hynix together account for over 30% of the weight of South Korea’s KOSPI index, driving the entire Korean stock market up 76% in 2025 and claiming the title of the world’s top-performing major index for the year.

Two memory chip manufacturers posted stellar earnings, sending the stock market of one country soaring.

The price increase is more direct. DDR4 memory chips rose from $1.45 in early 2025 to a peak of $17 in February 2026—a nearly 12-fold increase in one year. A 16GB Kingston memory stick from Huaqiangbei went from 200 yuan to 800 yuan. The reason your recent phone or computer purchases became more expensive lies partly in these stocks you didn’t buy.

SK Hynix's net profit surged 398% in Q1 2026, with an operating profit margin of 72%. Samsung Electronics' overall operating profit increased by 755% year-over-year.

Selling $100 worth of memory yields $72 in profit and $28 in cost. This isn't business anymore—it's mining.

In traditional markets, institutions are the ones in sharp suits with blank expressions saying, “We’re long-term bullish on the fundamentals,” while retail investors are the ones shouting “Go, go, go!” in group chats.

In 2025-2026, the storage sector will be the first to surge among institutional investors.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have placed open orders with Micron with no price or quantity restrictions.

The three words “unpriced” are worth considering—they mean whatever price you quote, I’ll pay it, no negotiation. This type of procurement typically occurs in wartime scenarios when governments purchase arms.

In 2025–2026, appear on tech companies' memory module purchases.

Broadcom has locked in supply through 2028 for the next three years.

SK Hynix stated at the investor conference: "All HBM capacity for 2026 has already been sold out."

All. The entire year.

HBM is high-end memory specifically designed for AI chips; for every AI chip NVIDIA sells, it must be paired with an HBM module. Only three companies worldwide—SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron—can produce HBM, with SK Hynix holding approximately 57% of the market. "Sold out" means that one of the most critical components in global AI infrastructure will have no excess supply for the entire year of 2026.

Then come the analysts.

Within three months, Wall Street’s consensus estimate for SanDisk’s 2026 earnings per share rose by 172%. Citigroup forecasts a 144% year-over-year increase in server DRAM prices for 2026. Nomura states that the supercycle will last at least until 2027, with meaningful supply increases not expected until 2028. After the stock had already surged several hundred percent, Melius upgraded Micron to Buy, adding without hesitation, “There is still a 41% upside potential over the next 12 months.”

DeepMind CEO Hassabis publicly stated that the entire memory supply chain is constrained, limiting widespread AI deployment. Intel CEO Chen Liwu said memory shortages will not ease before 2028.

Following this, SK Hynix secretly submitted an application to the SEC to issue ADRs on U.S. markets, aiming to raise up to $15 billion. A company with all its production capacity sold out and a profit margin of 72% has decided to raise additional capital in New York, citing that valuations in the Korean market are too low and that U.S. investors better understand AI and are willing to pay higher prices.

A-shares have caught up.

Demingli hit the daily limit up, Baiwei Storage surged, Jiangbo Long rose 41%, and small-cap Xiangnong Xinchuang forecasted a quarterly net profit increase of 6,714% to 8,747%—a three-digit percentage gain. Conversations in finance groups shifted from “Can I still buy the CSI 300?” to “Which should I buy, Micron or SK Hynix?” Two months ago, people didn’t know how to spell HBM; now they’re explaining how high-bandwidth memory works in group chats.

Even many matchmaking groups discuss holding stocks.

On February 24, 2026, Citron Research announced a short position on SanDisk, citing three reasons.

First, storage is a cyclical industry. In 2008, 2012, and 2018, every period of high profitability ended in a crash. Current production capacity is already twice the peak level seen in 2018; supply expansion is merely a matter of time.

Second, SanDisk sells commodities.

NVIDIA has a moat; SanDisk is just a commodity. NVIDIA’s moat is its CUDA software ecosystem, on which nearly all global AI models run, making it extremely costly to switch.

SanDisk's SSDs can be replicated exactly by Samsung tomorrow, possibly at an even lower price.

Third, major shareholder Western Data is significantly reducing its stake in SanDisk at a discount of 25% below market price.

Sell your stocks at a 25% discount. One possibility is that you urgently need cash; another is that you believe they will be cheaper in the future. In neither case is it called bullish on the market.

Two trading days later, SanDisk rebounded and continued to set new all-time highs. Citron’s report circulated widely across financial groups and became meme material.

One question everyone skipped: Who ended up with the shares sold at a 25% discount?

The world's three most profitable storage companies collectively chose not to expand production at their peak profitability.

SK Hynix's 2025 capital expenditures related to HBM are down 50% year-over-year, with the official explanation citing concerns over oversupply in 2027. Samsung's DRAM capacity growth in 2026 is only around 5%, significantly below the rate of demand growth.

The entire industry's capital expenditure growth rate is only 14%, whereas historically, each economic expansion period typically saw rates of 30% to 50%.

Three companies control 92% of global DRAM production and have chosen not to expand capacity—a scenario known in any other commodity market as supply-side coordination. OPEC did the same with oil, leading to the 1973 oil crisis. The concentration in the memory chip market is even higher than OPEC’s, with these three firms holding a combined market share that exceeds that of all thirteen oil-producing nations.

Investors interpret the manufacturer's restraint in expanding production as a positive sign, which is logically sound—prices can indeed be sustained longer. However, what this structure means for those on the other side of the trade—those buying in—is not addressed in any analyst report.

This market cycle can support two equally valid narratives.

First: AI's demand for storage represents a structural shift. AI models in the inference era require memory to retain increasingly long contexts, leading to an order-of-magnitude increase in memory needs. The three major memory manufacturers control 92% of production capacity, and new factories won't be operational until at least 2027, meaning the supply gap will persist until then.

Second: Just like every time in history. The narrative during the 2000 dot-com bubble was “the internet will change everything,” and that was true. The narrative during the 2008 subprime crisis was “housing prices won’t decline nationwide,” which also made sense based on historical data at the time. The real question has never been whether the story is right, but whether prices have already priced in that story.

There's a long-standing rule in the storage industry that has held for 30 years: prices rise slowly but fall quickly.

During the 2018 super cycle, the market dropped by half from its peak in less than two quarters.

No one knows on which day this top will occur—not even those who sold at a 25% discount, or especially those who sold at a 25% discount, because they were selling chips, and the most efficient way to sell chips is to those who still believe the story.

The last time you bought a phone, upgrading from 128GB to 256GB cost you a few hundred more dollars. That few hundred dollars, after traveling through an entire supply chain and being distributed at every level, ultimately contributed a small portion to SK Hynitz’s 72% operating profit margin, to Samsung’s 755% profit growth rate, and to all the stocks you didn’t buy.

And ultimately, when you open all your social media apps, you see others’ soul-searching questions: Why is it so easy to make money in the U.S. stock market?