The worldwide external enterprise storage systems market brought in $10,341.5 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 33.6% year over year, according to IDC. The growth isn’t coming solely from businesses buying more capacity: infrastructure refreshes that were delayed over the past few years, AI projects, and rising NAND and DRAM prices are pushing companies to move up their investments and pay more for their storage systems.
Enterprise storage in 30 seconds
- The market reached $10,341.5 million between April and June, up 33.6% year over year.
- All-flash systems generated $5.4 billion and now account for 52.1% of revenue.
- The high-end segment, with systems priced above $250,000, grew 90.6%.
- IDC ties the increase to AI, infrastructure refreshes, and rising NAND and DRAM prices.
- Dell holds the global lead with a 23.8% share, followed by Huawei and NetApp.
The figure marks the second-largest quarter ever recorded by IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker and the best result outside a fourth quarter. It also accelerates the 28.7% growth logged in the first three months of 2026.
The comparison with 2025 helps put the pace of change into perspective. The market grew just 3.9% for all of last year, according to IDC. It has now strung together two quarters with increases close to or above 30%.
But the numbers need an additional caveat: billing 33.6% more doesn’t mean companies bought 33.6% more storage capacity.
IDC explicitly notes that rising component prices are driving up the cost of systems, and that some customers are buying less capacity while paying more for it.
Storage Is Getting Budget Again After Two Years Focused on GPUs
Artificial intelligence is one of the explanations, though not the only one.
During 2024 and 2025, many organizations poured a large share of their investment into servers and accelerated compute capacity to kick off AI projects. IDC believes some enterprise storage refreshes were pushed back during that period.
That pending spending is now coming back.
The situation lines up with how AI projects are evolving. Training a model requires a huge amount of compute, but once organizations start rolling out inference applications, they need continuous access to their own data.
Documents, images, video, databases, logs, scientific data, and other datasets need to feed those systems.
That raises the importance of storage and, above all, of how fast servers can retrieve information.
The result shows up especially in all-flash array (AFA) systems.
| Storage type | Q2 2026 revenue | Growth | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-flash | $5.4 billion | 42.9% | 52.1% |
| Hybrid flash | $3.9 billion | 25.5% | 37.5% |
| HDD-only | $1.1 billion | 22.6% | 10.4% |
All-flash systems thus topped half of the market’s revenue.
Hybrid arrays, which combine SSDs and hard drives, still hold 37.5%, while platforms based solely on HDDs account for roughly one in every ten dollars billed.
That doesn’t mean hard drives are disappearing from data centers, either. The report covers external enterprise systems sold by vendors, not all the storage installed worldwide. HDDs remain widely used for high-capacity storage, archiving, backups, distributed systems, and cloud services.
Systems Priced Above $250,000 Grow 90.6%
The sharpest shift shows up at the top of the market.
IDC classifies systems with an average selling price above $250,000 as high-end. Their revenue reached $2.7 billion for the quarter, up 90.6% year over year.
They now account for 26.2% of the market.
Systems priced between $25,000 and $250,000 generated $6.7 billion, growing 28.2%, while the entry-level segment, under $25,000, fell 14.6% to roughly $900 million.
| Segment | Q2 2026 revenue | Year-over-year change |
|---|---|---|
| Above $250,000 | $2.7 billion | +90.6% |
| $25,000-$250,000 | $6.7 billion | +28.2% |
| Under $25,000 | $900 million | -14.6% |
IDC links the high-end growth to large-scale AI infrastructure deployments and to the refresh of systems some organizations had postponed.
The firm also sees rising demand for all-flash storage built to provide the bandwidth needed between data and GPUs.
The challenge with AI infrastructure doesn’t end once you buy accelerators. A cluster with expensive GPUs loses efficiency if the processors sit waiting for data to arrive from storage.
The relationship between compute, networking, and storage is thus becoming tighter as dataset sizes and the number of accelerators keep growing.
NAND and DRAM Are Making It More Expensive to Store Data
There’s another factor less related to technological growth: components cost more.
IDC notes that memory makers are prioritizing production capacity for higher-margin products, while pressure on NAND and DRAM continues.
The effect is especially visible in SSDs.
The firm doesn’t expect meaningful relief from this situation before 2028. That’s an IDC forecast, and it will depend on how supply, new fabs, AI demand, and memory makers’ investments evolve.
Enterprise buyers are reacting.
According to IDC’s channel checks, some organizations are moving orders forward to lock in budgets and configurations before possible further price increases.
That creates an effect that can temporarily inflate growth.
A company that planned to refresh storage within six months might decide to buy now, expecting the same system to cost more later. That purchase boosts current demand at the expense of pulling forward some future demand.
IDC believes the combination of prices, pending refreshes, and artificial intelligence will keep the market above its historical growth rates for the rest of 2026, even as component availability limits growth in volume.
Dell Holds Nearly a Quarter of the Market
The recovery is benefiting practically every major vendor.
Dell Technologies keeps the top spot with $2,458.7 million in quarterly revenue and a 23.8% share, continuing the momentum behind platforms like PowerStore. Its sales grew 42.5% compared with the same quarter of 2025.
Huawei ranks second with $1,168.9 million and an 11.3% share.
NetApp comes in third with $988.4 million and a 9.6% share.
| Vendor | Q2 2026 revenue | Share | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dell Technologies | $2,458.7 million | 23.8% | 42.5% |
| Huawei | $1,168.9 million | 11.3% | 29.4% |
| NetApp | $988.4 million | 9.6% | 35.7% |
| Everpure | $837.7 million | 8.1% | 50.0% |
| Hewlett Packard Enterprise | $700.2 million | 6.8% | 31.9% |
| Others | $4,187.5 million | 40.5% | 27.2% |
Everpure posted the highest growth among the top five, 50%, reaching an 8.1% share. Hewlett Packard Enterprise rounds out the group with 6.8%.
The market therefore remains fairly fragmented. The five largest vendors account for around 59.5% of revenue, and the rest of the vendors hold a bit more than 40%.
Western Europe Grows 42.8%
The expansion isn’t concentrated solely in the United States, either.
All nine regions tracked by IDC increased their revenue compared with the second quarter of 2025.
The United States remains the largest market, with $3.6 billion, growth of 26.8%, and 35.3% of worldwide revenue.
Western Europe holds the second regional spot with roughly $1.9 billion and growth of 42.8%.
China reached $2.2 billion, up 20.7%.
The biggest percentage gains came from Canada, at 77.2%, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan and China, at 73.1%, and Central and Eastern Europe, at 54.1%.
Japan was the slowest-growing region and still advanced 12.9%.
The data points to a global growth cycle, but also to an unusual mix of factors. Companies need more storage to work with growing volumes of data and AI projects, at the same time that storage is getting more expensive.
That’s why revenue can grow much faster than the capacity actually installed.
The next phase of enterprise AI could make that gap even more visible. Buying GPUs lets you run models, but deploying them against corporate data means figuring out where the data lives, how it’s protected, and how fast it can reach the systems that need it.
After two years in which the spotlight fell mainly on accelerators, storage is thus reclaiming a bigger share of the data center budget.
via: IDC
