Did Kioxia just unveil the fastest SSD ever? GP series uses Storage Class Memory to feed the HBM GPU with millions of IOPS
Date:
Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:25:00 +0000
Description:
Kioxia launches GP Series SSD using Storage Class Memory to expand GPU-accessible memory, targeting high-performance AI workloads and millions
of IOPS.
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now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Kioxia GP Series SSD provides GPUs with faster memory access beyond HBM
limits Storage Class Memory bridges the performance gap between DRAM and conventional NAND flash storage XL-FLASH prioritizes low latency and millions of random IOPS over sequential speed Kioxia has introduced a new type of solid-state drive designed to function as a direct memory expansion for GPUs.
The new Kioxia GP Series , announced at Nvidia GTC 2026, is not a replacement for existing storage, but rather an additional tier in the memory hierarchy. Its primary role is to provide a larger pool of fast-accessible data for GPUs , effectively acting as an overflow for the expensive and capacity-limited High Bandwidth Memory. Article continues below You may like Guess where all the NAND flash components are going? The 8th (yes, eighth) 245TB SSD has been announced amidst race to quench AI storage thirst of hyperscalers This is the first PCIe 6.0 SSD you can actually buy and by 'you' I mean hyperscalers Micron 9650 can reach 28GBps read speeds and will only be used for AI inference Samsung and Sandisk are set to integrate rival HBF technology into AI products from Nvidia, AMD, and Google within 24 months, and that's a huge deal Memory-hungry AI models drive the change The drive leverages Storage Class Memory (SCM), a category of technology that sits in the performance gap between traditional NAND flash and system DRAM .
This concept was popularized years ago by Intels now-discontinued Optane technology , which aimed to bridge the same divide, but failed.
Kioxias version, branded as XL-FLASH, prioritizes low latency and high input/output operations per second over raw sequential throughput, allowing finer-grained data access at just 512bytes.
This development is a direct response to a fundamental problem in current AI infrastructure, GPU memory is simply not big enough for the models it is
asked to run. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners
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As AI models scale toward trillions of parameters and context windows expand to millions of tokens, the demand for memory to store items like the KV cache has outpaced the physical limits of HBM.
Nvidias Storage-Next initiative, which this SSD supports, was created to address this exact bottleneck by encouraging storage vendors to build drives that GPUs can link to directly.
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. What to read next Micron announces a QLC SSD just weeks after killing its beloved Crucial brand the 3610 is a basic Gen5 SSD that's somehow faster
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unlocks hardware compression to deliver incredible PCIe SSD speeds
While the GP Series aims for millions of IOPS to feed data to GPUs, the broader industry is chasing even more ambitious performance targets.
The concept of reaching 100 million IOPS is a known industry pipedream , one that may require inventing entirely new classes of memory.
Other companies are also targeting the niche market that Optane left behind.
For example, the InnoGrit N3X SSD uses Kioxias XL-Flash in SLC mode to
deliver extreme endurance.
This drive can reportedly withstand up to 50 full drive writes per day for five consecutive years.
Kioxia itself has previously signaled its intent to push toward even higher performance figures.
The company is aiming for 10 million IOPS using SLC NAND , which suggests
that the GP Series is just one step in a longer race to eliminate storage latency for processors.
It remains to be seen whether the Kioxia GP Series SSD will succeed where previous SCM attempts stumbled. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your
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