SK hynix last week used the 2025 Global Summit to reveal its AI NAND strategy and AIN storage products aimed at artificial intelligence applications. While AI systems have historically used storage devices designed for enterprise servers, SK hynix believes that purpose-built NAND-based storage solutions — AIB P, AIN B, and AIN D — will better serve the needs of AI servers and clusters and will enable higher performance efficiency.
Going forward, SK hynix will offer three distinct product lineups tailored for the specific needs of AI clusters and servers: AIN D for high-density storage, AIN P for high-performance storage, and AIN B — based on High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) technology — for emerging ultra-high-performance storage devices that can be installed along HBM memory. Each product family is designed to address its own set of workloads with their own set of technologies while balancing capabilities and costs to improve every stage of AI, from ingestion and archiving to training and inference.
SK hynix's AIN D (Density) solution will use 3D QLC NAND to store massive AI datasets at the lowest cost per bit when it comes to NAND flash memory. The company expects AIN D to be designed to reach petabyte-level density, far beyond today's terabyte-scale SSDs, which retain key benefits of solid-state drives, such as fast access time and high throughput. SK hynix plans to replace nearline HDDs with these products.
By contrast, AIN P (Performance) will address performance needs of AI inference applications with redesigned SSD controllers and 3D NAND flash memory to maximize input-output operations (IOPS) with a 512B granularity for AI workloads, such as vector database searches and fine-grained random reads. Indeed, SK hynix expects samples of its AIN P SSDs to deliver around 50 million 512B IOPS with a PCIe 6.0 interface and up to 100 million IOPS with a PCIe 6.0* interface by 2027.
"The architecture can deliver up to 50 million IOPS with the 512-byte access for PCIe 6.0, which is seven times higher than conventional PCIe Gen6 enterprise SSD," said Chunsung Kim, vice president of SK hynix. "It is not just built for AI workloads, AIM P can also deliver high IOPS and throughputs for conventional storage applications as well. The proof of concept sample will be available in the E3 form-factor by the end of next year and 100 million IOPS over Gen6, the mass production capable product will be available by the end of 2027.
*A single PCIe 6.0 x4 SSD cannot physically sustain 100 million 512-byte IOPS. The link bandwidth caps out around 31 GB/s vs. around 48 GB/s such performance would require. Reaching that figure would need PCIe 6.0 x8 or x16, PCIe 7.0 x4, or a custom interconnect.
The most advanced element of SK hynix's AI NAND family will be AIN B (Bandwidth) — solid-state storage devices based on the HBF technology developed by SanDisk and co-standardized now by SanDisk and SK hynix. The architecture promises to combine HBM-like bandwidth with NAND density, enabling AI systems to handle more inference batches or longer token sequences without adding AI accelerators or HBM. Given that there is no HBF standard, SK hynix does not talk about actual performance numbers or when it expects AIN B to become available. At the summit, both companies hosted the 'HBF Night' event, where they called for collaborative effort to accelerate NAND innovation.
Both firms co-hosted an 'HBF Night' during the summit, gathering engineers and architects from major global tech players to coordinate ecosystem development.
"Through OCP Global Summit and HBF Night, we were able to showcase SK hynix's present and future as a global AI memory solution provider, thriving in a rapidly evolving AI market," Ahn Hyun, President and Chief Development Officer, said. "In the next generation NAND storage market, SK hynix will collaborate closely with customers and partners to become a key player."
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