Kioxia Group today announced a series of technology advancements aimed at accelerating the next generation of AI infrastructure, including the launch of the KIOXIA GP1 Series PCIe® 6.0 NVMe™ Super High IOPS SSDs, the introduction of 10th-generation QLC 3D flash memory technology developed jointly with Sandisk, and a broad showcase of AI-focused storage innovations at FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage 2026. As AI workloads continue to grow in scale and complexity, Kioxia is expanding its portfolio of flash memory and SSD technologies to address the industry's increasing demands for performance, capacity, power efficiency, and scalability.

KIOXIA GP1 Series: Super High IOPS SSDs for AI
Kioxia introduced the KIOXIA GP1 Series PCIe® 6.0 NVMe™ SSDs, the first product in its GP Series of Super High IOPS SSDs optimized for GPU direct access. Built with KIOXIA XL-FLASH™ generation 2 technology, the GP1 Series delivers up to 10 million random read IOPS at a 512-byte block size, enabling flash-based memory expansion for AI systems. Evaluation samples are expected to be available to select customers by the end of 2026.

The GP1 Series is designed to support emerging AI storage architectures that extend High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with a flash-based memory tier, allowing AI systems to access larger datasets while improving GPU utilization. Kioxia stated that the architecture is intended to scale from today's 10 million random read IOPS toward future generations targeting up to 100 million IOPS.

Key GP1 Features
PCIe® 6.0 and NVMe™ 2.2 support.
KIOXIA XL-FLASH™ generation 2 low-latency flash memory.
Up to 10 million random read IOPS at a 512-byte block size.
E3.S and E1.S form factors with selective liquid-cooling support.
Up to 50 DWPD endurance.
Next-Generation QLC 3D Flash Memory Sets New Density Benchmark

Kioxia and Sandisk also unveiled their 10th-generation QLC 3D flash memory technology, achieving more than 37 Gb/mm² bit density, representing up to a 60% increase compared with the companies' 8th-generation technology and establishing what the companies describe as an industry-leading benchmark for density, performance, and power efficiency.

The technology leverages the companies' CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture, which separately fabricates CMOS logic and memory arrays before bonding them together using high-precision wafer-to-wafer alignment. The new QLC technology also becomes the industry's first QLC 3D flash memory to achieve a 4.8 Gb/s interface speed.

Additional enhancements improve I/O transfer power efficiency, helping address power consumption and cooling challenges in AI and hyperscale cloud environments.

Key 10th-Generation QLC Technology Highlights
332-layer architecture with optimized floorplan design delivering more than 37 Gb/mm² bit density and up to 60% higher density than the previous generation.
4.8 Gb/s NAND interface enabled by Toggle DDR6.0 and the Separate Command Address (SCA) protocol.
CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture for improved density scaling, performance, and manufacturing efficiency.
Power-Isolated Low-Tapped Termination (PI-LTT) technology to improve I/O data-out transfer power efficiency.

Hideshi Miyajima, Chief Technology Officer at Kioxia, said that QLC technology helps efficiently store rapidly growing data volumes associated with increasingly sophisticated AI applications and supports improved scalability and performance for AI systems.

Kioxia to Showcase AI Storage Portfolio at FMS 2026
At FMS 2026 in Santa Clara, California, Kioxia will demonstrate how its flash memory and SSD portfolio supports AI infrastructure across data center, cloud, and edge environments.

Featured technologies include:
KIOXIA GP1 Series Super High IOPS SSDs
KIOXIA CM10 Series PCIe® 6.0 Enterprise SSDs built with BiCS FLASH™ generation 10 memory
KIOXIA NX1 Series liquid-cooling-capable data center SSDs
Context memory caching solutions for AI inference
245.76 TB KIOXIA LC9 Series QLC SSDs
KIOXIA AiSAQ™ open-source software for vector database scalability
BiCS FLASH™ generation 10 technology
CXL™ memory modules incorporating XL-FLASH™
UFS 5.0 embedded flash memory solutions
High-capacity, low-latency QLC flash memory packaging technologies

Kioxia's participation at FMS will include keynote presentations, executive panel discussions, technical sessions, and live technology demonstrations focused on AI infrastructure, flash memory innovation, SSD architectures, computational storage, CXL™, and NVMe™ technologies.

Together, these announcements reinforce Kioxia's strategy of advancing memory and storage technologies that address the capacity, performance, and energy-efficiency requirements of the rapidly evolving AI era.