Kioxia Rides AI NAND Boom to Record ¥870.4B Profit, Plans US Listing

Kioxia Holdings Corp. reported record full-year operating profit of ¥870.4 billion ($US5.5 billion) on Thursday and confirmed it would list American depositary shares on a US exchange. The Japanese memory maker is riding an AI-fuelled shortage of NAND flash storage to its strongest financial performance since being carved out of Toshiba. Shares of the Tokyo-listed company have surged roughly 300 per cent year-to-date, making Kioxia the world’s best-performing major stock in 2026.

The results mark an extraordinary reversal for the company, which shelved a planned initial public offering in 2024 when NAND prices were in freefall. In the 18 months since, demand from hyperscale cloud providers racing to build AI infrastructure has overwhelmed supply, sending memory prices sharply higher and filling Kioxia’s order books through to the end of calendar 2026. The company now commands a market capitalisation of roughly ¥24.2 trillion, surpassing Japan’s Sony Group and Fast Retailing.

Revenue for the year ended March 2026 climbed 37 per cent to ¥2.34 trillion, the company said in a regulatory filing published on its investor relations website. Net profit more than doubled to ¥554.5 billion, driven by the same tailwinds of higher volumes and improved pricing. Kioxia IR The fourth quarter was the standout: operating profit hit a record ¥596.8 billion, more than triple the prior quarter’s figure, as the combined effect of higher shipment volumes and rising average selling prices flowed through the income statement. CNA/Reuters Across the full year, operating profit rose 92.7 per cent to ¥870.4 billion, handily beating the company’s own forecasts issued earlier in the fiscal year.

“The biggest driver is selling prices, which we expect to rise significantly across all applications,” chief financial officer Hideki Hanazawa told analysts on an earnings call in February, as reported by industry publication Blocks and Files. Blocks and Files The remarks proved prescient. By the March quarter, Kioxia was posting its strongest margins since listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2024, with price increases extending beyond high-end enterprise SSDs into the consumer market.

Looking ahead, Kioxia forecast first-quarter operating profit of ¥1.3 trillion ($US8.2 billion) for the April-to-June period, a leap of 117.5 per cent from a year earlier and well ahead of analyst estimates. CNA/Reuters The bullish guidance underscores how persistently tight the NAND market has become. AI training and inference workloads require vast banks of high-speed storage. Major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have shown no willingness to dial back their infrastructure spending. Hanazawa’s February call that the company’s 2026 output was “fully booked” has been borne out by the numbers.

The company said it is preparing to list American Depositary Shares on a US exchange to broaden its investor base, though it did not specify which exchange or offer a timeline. The announcement arrives at a moment of maximum momentum: Kioxia shares closed at ¥44,450 on 15 May, against a 52-week range of ¥1,950 to ¥53,490. Bloomberg A US listing would give American institutional investors direct access to a pure-play NAND manufacturer. The semiconductor supply chain has become a focal point of geopolitical and investment attention.

The supply-demand dynamics underpinning Kioxia’s results extend across the memory sector. TrendForce reported in February that the company had sold out all planned NAND output for 2026, a position echoed by rivals Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, both of which have posted sharply higher memory revenue as AI server deployments accelerate. TrendForce Enterprise SSDs, the high-capacity storage workhorses inside data centre servers, have shouldered the steepest price increases. Cloud operators are scrambling to provision storage for workloads that show no sign of plateauing. Industry analysts at TrendForce noted the NAND market has tightened faster than any memory cycle in the past decade.

Kioxia’s US listing ambition revives a goal that was abandoned when the memory market turned sour in 2024. The speed of the turnaround, from scrapped IPO to record earnings in under two years, illustrates how comprehensively the AI infrastructure cycle has reshaped the semiconductor supply chain. With hyperscale cloud providers projecting another year of double-digit capital expenditure growth in 2026, the pricing power Kioxia and its rivals currently enjoy may have further to run.