Kioxia has announced the development of an SSD that enable GPUs to directly access high-speed flash memory as an extension of their built-in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Kioxia says its Super High IOPS SSD is purpose-built to meet the growing demands of AI and high-performance computing, delivering efficient and low-latency data access.
Made in collaboration with Nvidia’s Storage-Next initiative, Kioxia’s Super High IOPS SSD is described as a new type of SSD built for AI systems of today and the future, offering GPUs access to much more memory capacity than HBM chips, and without the high costs associated with DRAM products. This potentially makes it an ideal product to scale up data-intensive and AI systems while DRAM demand and prices are at an all-time high.
Nvidia’s Storage-Next initiative aims to address the anticipated shift from compute-focused to data-intensive workloads by expanding the GPU’s access to memory spaces far beyond what’s possible with GDDR7 and especially HBM. This should allow the GPU to work with larger data sets, which would improve its utilisation and latency by keeping data closer to the compute resources. The initiative calls on SSD vendors to design drives optimised for GPU-initiated workloads, effectively acting as an expansion of the GPU’s packaged HBM memory.
For its GP Series SSDs, Kioxia is using its high-performance XL-Flash memory, promising high IOPS, finer-grained 512-byte data access, and lower power consumption per operation, compared to conventional TLC NAND SSDs. Earlier reports indicate that the company is targeting 3x faster speeds than any available SSD with this NAND, and IOPS counts of 10 million. Large language models’ Key–Value cache and GPU cache lines work with very small pieces of data, so SSDs optimised for many tiny random IOs, instead of large sequential transfers, can serve those caches much more efficiently.
“Kioxia fully supports the Nvidia Storage-Next initiative and will deliver purpose-built SSDs to effectively address the need for GPU-accessible memory,” said Makoto Hamada, senior director of the SSD Division, Kioxia Corporation. “This collaboration is instrumental in shaping the future of AI storage architecture.”
To accompany the new GP Series, the brand is also putting forward its CM9 Series PCIe 5.0 E3.S SSDs, which will support Nvidia’s Context Memory Storage (CMX), and are designed to extend memory beyond the GPU. These will be available with 25.6TB of TLC capacity and 3 DWPD (drive writes per day) endurance.
Kioxia has confirmed that evaluation samples of the GP Series will begin shipping in Q3 2026, with consumer availability by the end of 2026.
