Market size and growth rate
2025 scale: approximately 4.78 billion to 5.37 billion RMB (differences in statistical criteria are due to whether complete modules are included or only controller chips), with a year-on-year growth of 12.3%–12.4%.
2026 forecast: expected to reach 5.37–5.89 billion yuan, with growth maintained at around 12%, mainly driven by the expansion of AI training cluster storage nodes and the replacement of existing Xinchuang stock.
Price trend: The average unit price is about 3,820 yuan per piece, up 3%, with growth driven by volume expansion (+11.3%) rather than price increases
Product structure and technological evolution
Interface iteration: PCIe 4.0 remains mainstream (accounting for over 63% of shipments by 2025), and PCIe 5.0 controller penetration is expected to rise to 41.3% by 2026, becoming standard in high-end devices.
Protocol Differentiation:
SAS/SATA array cards: accounting for about 60%–64%, dominating the mid-range and existing markets, with steady growth.
NVMe array cards: Emerging breakthrough point, expected to account for about 30%–36% in 2025, with growth exceeding 50% in 2026 due to hardware offloading supporting NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics).
Feature upgrade: evolving from pure data redundancy to intelligent storage controllers, integrating AI inference acceleration, online deduplication compression, and DPU collaborative unloading capabilities
Competitive landscape: high concentration and domestic breakthroughs
The market is dominated by two oligos, with domestic manufacturers quickly catching up, with the top five companies together holding over 70% of the market share.
International giant: Broadcom firmly holds the top position (market share about 32%–38%), monopolizing the ultra-high-end market with its PCIe 5.0 SoC chip barriers and deep OEM binding; Microchip ranks second (about 19%–21%), with advantages in mid-range and firmware customization.
Local Leader: Huawei HiSilicon (market share about 15%–19%), leveraging the Kunpeng ecosystem and self-developed Hi1822 chip, has significantly increased penetration in government and enterprise information innovation fields Montage Technology and other domestic chip manufacturers have achieved mass production of PCIe 5.0 SoCs, entering the supply chains of Sugon and Lenovo.
Localization rate: By 2025, domestic controller chips will have a failure rate of 0.87‰ for projects with over a thousand units, close to international levels, but there is still a gap in ultra-high-end scenarios where a single card supports ≥ 64 NVMe SSDs
Application fields and regional distribution
Core scenarios: Internet data centers (about 38%) and financial industry (about 22%) are the *** demand sides; Of the new demand in 2026, 41.3% will come from AI training clusters, setting new requirements for low latency (<500ns).
Regional concentration: The three major economic circles—East China (Yangtze River Delta), South China (Pearl River Delta), and North China (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei)—together account for over 75%, which is highly correlated with data center construction density
Key challenges and trends
Substitution risk: Software Defined Storage (SDS) and CXL memory pooling technologies may weaken the position of traditional hardware RAID cards in the long term, but the core trading system's demand for deterministic low latency still ensures the essential need for hardware cards.
Policy Driver: Starting in 2026, the mandatory localization rate of storage controllers for party, government, and central enterprise projects will not be less than 85%, forcing supply chain localization. The proportion of domestic manufacturers introduced is expected to rise from 14.7% to 33.2%.