Kioxia has developed a prototype of the 5TB high-bandwidth flash memory module with a bandwidth of 64 GB/s. It's essentially NAND-based memory for GPUs. Compared to HBM, High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) adapts the concept to NAND flash, offering 8-16x the capacity of DRAM-based HBM. By combining speed with persistent storage, HBF enables large AI datasets to be accessed efficiently while using less power. One of these HBF modules, which Kioxia has pushed to 64 GB/s, is what allows this capability.
When you hear “flash storage,” you usually think in terms of capacity first, speed second. Even the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs today—14 GB/s class drives like Samsung’s 9100 Pro—are dwarfed by the bandwidth demands of modern GPUs and CPUs. Kioxia’s new prototype turns that expectation on its head: a single flash module delivering 5 TB of capacity and 64 GB/s of sustained bandwidth over PCIe 6.0. To put that into perspective, that’s over 4x faster than the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives shipping today, and within striking distance of HBM2E’s per-stack throughput.
