The global memory chip market just had its best month ever, and it wasn’t even close. Monthly sales hit $74.6 billion in July 2026, a 31.7% jump from the prior month, according to the UBS July Memory Monthly report.
The culprit, as with seemingly everything in tech right now, is artificial intelligence. The insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory to power AI workloads has turned the memory sector into one of the hottest corners of the semiconductor industry.
The numbers behind the boom
DRAM sales, which make up the larger share of the memory market, came in at approximately $48 billion. That’s a 27.7% increase from the previous month.
NAND flash memory had an even more dramatic showing, surging 40.7% month-over-month to hit a record $25.8 billion. NAND is the type of memory used in solid-state drives and data center storage, both of which are seeing explosive demand as AI training and inference workloads scale up.
