Kioxia All Set to Raise the NAND Game in AI SSDs

2026-07-06T07:29:33Z

Here is how the Japanese chipmaker is cashing in on NAND flash demand in data center SSDs.

Kioxia has leapfrogged the memory industry’s big three—Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix—by launching a 332-layer NAND flash with a 4.8 Gb/s interface speed. The Japanese memory chipmaker is starting sample shipments of 1Tb triple-level cell (TLC) memory devices built on its 10th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, primarily targeting

The semiconductor memory market, infamous for its brutal boom-and-bust cycles, has turned into a goldmine in the AI era, and Kioxia is one of the poster children of this historic surge, along with the memory industry’s big three. However, unlike Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, which are heavily invested in fulfilling

“Chipmakers prioritized DRAM so much that they put NAND investment and development on the back burner,” Satoru Oyama told Reuters. “They haven’t been able to respond to the current NAND boom at all. That is why demand is now concentrated on Kioxia alone.” Oyama is a consultant who previously worked at Tokyo Electron.

Kazuyoshi Saito, an analyst at IwaiCosmo ⁠Securities, added that Kioxia is two to four years ahead of rivals in NAND performance and power consumption, thanks to its wafer bonding technology. Kioxia’s CMOS directly bonded to array (CBA) technology places manufacturing memory cells and control circuits separately on wafers and then bonds them to boost performance.

In other words, a CBA is created by bonding a CMOS wafer and a cell array wafer that are manufactured separately. Then there is on-pitch select gate drain (OPS) technology, which further reduces power consumption by 10% at the input and 34% at the output.

Omdia analyst Akira Minamikawa acknowledged Kioxia’s technology lead in NAND flash. “Kioxia’s NAND chips are highly superior to their rivals’ in terms of data processing speed, which is what’s most important for U.S. hyperscalers,” he said. “The newest 10th-generation chips are a big advance on that front, making them very competitive.”

Kioxia’s dramatic comeback

Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory, has mostly struggled since its spinoff from Toshiba in 2018. The following year, a Bain Capital-led consortium acquired Toshiba’s memory business and renamed it Kioxia, a portmanteau of the Japanese word

Then came a twist with the arrival of the AI bandwagon. AI usage expanded from training models on large volumes of data to inference, driving

That’s why Kioxia aims to capitalize on soaring demand for AI data center storage while lowering its reliance on memory devices geared for smartphone manufacturers such as Apple. Besides enterprise and data center SSDs, Kioxia CEO Hiroo Ota believes the NAND flash memory market will expand further as AI agents and AI-generated content proliferate in robots and other smart machines.

Kioxia and its strategic partner, Sandisk, first unveiled the 10th-generation, 332-layer BiCS FLASH technology preview at ISSCC 2025. These 3D flash memory chips aim to better meet AI data center requirements by offering higher efficiency and transmission speeds.

Compared to Kioxia’s 8th-generation 3D NAND flash, which stacked 218 layers, the 10th-generation chips are claimed to improve data storage density by 59% and power efficiency by 30%. However, samples of this BiCS Flash memory device, developed in collaboration with ‌Sandisk, are made available for functional testing, and the specifications of the samples may differ from those in mass production.

Kioxia said it will start mass production of these NAND flash chips next year at its Kitakami fab in Iwate Prefecture.

Memory turnaround in AI gold rush

The AI-led memory crunch has driven Kioxia’s stock price up sevenfold and its market capitalization to over $250 billion, surpassing Toyota Motor’s. In fact, this memory spinoff from beleaguered industrial conglomerate Toshiba is now Japan’s largest company by market value.

It’s also a huge boost for Japan Inc., which captured nearly half of the global semiconductor market during the 1980s but eventually shrank to less than 10%. However, while the Kioxia turnaround story is a welcome relief for Japan Inc., concerns remain about whether the AI gold rush will persist and whether this unprecedented memory chip boom is sustainable as Kioxia and its peers ramp up supply.

Next, despite Kioxia’s technological edge, Samsung and SK Hynix still hold large market shares in NAND flash memory, and these Korean memory giants have a reputation for catching up quickly. Memory chip underdogs in China—Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT)—are also closing in fast.

Kioxia’s 10th-generation BiCS FLASH device is a genuinely higher-capacity, higher-speed die, not just an incremental spec bump. That gives the Japanese chipmaker a rare lever to ease the AI-driven flash shortage. However, at the intersection of two relentlessly competitive technologies—AI and flash memory—Kioxia can’t afford to sit on its laurels.

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RELATED TOPICS: AI INFERENCE CMOS DATA CENTERS DATA PROCESSING FLASH MEMORY NAND FLASH SEMICONDUCTORS SSD STORAGE

COMPANIES: KIOXIA

Majeed Ahmad, Editor in Chief of EDN and Planet Analog, has covered electronics design industry for longer than two decades. During this period, he has worked in various editorial positions, including assignments for EE Times Asia and Electronic Products. He holds a Masters’ degree in telecommunication engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology. Follow Majeed on LinkedIn