Kioxia-Nvidia project aims for SSD performance 33 times higher than today's top drives

Forward-looking: The collaboration between Kioxia and Nvidia marks another step forward for AI data center infrastructure. By pushing toward SSDs capable of 100 million IOPS – dramatically higher than today's top-end drives, which peak around 3 million – the companies are tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in training and deploying massive AI models: data movement. If successful, this breakthrough could not only accelerate the pace of innovation in GenAI, but also redefine how data centers are built, upend competitive dynamics in cloud and enterprise storage, and set new expectations for the entire hardware stack.

Semiconductor memory maker Kioxia is developing next-generation SSD technology designed for ultra-fast read speeds to support demanding AI workloads. The company announced it intends to commercialize an SSD capable of delivering up to 100 million random IOPS by 2027, a performance benchmark about 30 – 35x greater than current high-end models. This ambitious project is being developed ...