Kioxia is working with Nvidia to build a solid-state drive that would deliver 100 million random IOPS already in 2027, the company said at a news conference earlier this month, Nikkei reports. Nvidia reportedly plans to use a couple of such SSDs — totalling a whopping 200 million IOPS — attached directly to its GPUs to boost AI performance.
"We will proceed with development in accordance with the proposals and requests from Nvidia," said Koichi Fukuda, chief technology officer of Kioxia's SSD division.
100 million IOPS SSD
Kioxia's drives with 100 million random read speeds are projected to use a PCIe 7.0 interface to connect to GPUs in a peer-to-peer mode and will be exclusively designed for use in AI servers that need to access and process vast amounts of data quickly.
Today's high-end solid-state drives can deliver around 3 million 4K random IOPS, but to meet the performance needs of modern and upcoming GPUs — which are optimized for burst memory access — they need to get substantially faster and change the way they interact with NAND media.
Earlier this year, Silicon Motion's CEO Wallace Kou told Tom's Hardware that Nvidia was interested in building SSDs that offer as many as 100 million random IOPS, 33 times more than existing drives can deliver. Around the same time, Kioxia disclosed plans to build XL-Flash-based 'AI SSDs' with over 10 million 512K random read IOPS in the second half of 2026.
AI workloads rely on frequent, small, random reads to retrieve embeddings, model parameters, or database entries. In such cases, 512-byte blocks better represent actual usage patterns than 4KB blocks and provide lower latency. While drives that operate 512B blocks may not deliver the same raw bandwidth as typical SSDs with 4K blocks, it is easier to scale out sequential read/write speeds with multiple drives than to lower the latencies of conventional SSDs.
It remains to be seen whether Kioxia's AI SSD with a 10 million 512K IOPS random performance will materialize in 2026 if Kioxia plans to build drives with a 100 million IOPS random performance in 2027.
Using XL-Flash?
What is interesting is how exactly Kioxia plans to build its 100 million IOPS drive. Its proposed AI SSD is based on XL-Flash, which is SLC NAND memory with high endurance, very low latency, and fairly high performance. Kioxia's XL-Flash devices feature 16 planes (up significantly from 3 to 6 planes on modern 3D NAND devices for client PCs), which points to higher sequential and random performance. As Kioxia does not publish specifications of XL-Flash, it is impossible to judge the per-device performance of this memory type.
Meanwhile, considering that an Innogrit Tacoma-based 400GB XL-Flash SSD with 32 NAND dies (with seven allocated for overprovisioning) and a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface delivers 3.5 million random read IOPS and 0.5 million random write IOPS, we can estimate that each die contributes up to 109,375 random read IOPS and 15,625 random write IOPS—though this calculation comes with some caveats.
Assuming perfect linear scaling across loads of NAND devices, a 100 million 512B IOPS SSD would require 915 of such dies (presuming the same levels of over provisioning). Now that Kioxia knows how to pack 32 NAND ICs into a single package, it can certainly build a drive based on 915 XL-Flash ICs (in 28 packages). Such a drive would require a special controller with at least a PCIe 5.0 x16 host interface (though PCIe 7.0 x4 would be more preferable). The problem is, there is no perfect linear scaling. Real-world performance of NAND devices in SSDs is limited by channel bandwidth, multi‑plane constraints, command pipelining/overheads, queue depth, firmware, and loads of other factors. Hence, the best case scenario for a 100 million 512B IOPS SSD featuring XL-Flash devices is a multi-controller module with dozens of controllers and a switch. Such a solution may well make sense in all-flash arrays, but Kioxia is explicitly talking about an SSD.
Welcome, HBF?
Since using traditional 3D NAND memory for a 100 million IOPS SSD with 512B blocks is not exactly feasible, whereas using a brand-new type of media on a commercial data center-grade product is highly unlikely, Kioxia might instead look to emerging technologies that use NAND memory in an unconventional way.
One of such technologies is probably high bandwidth flash (HBF) that packs up to 16 NAND devices and a logic die (a controller?) into a single stack and interconnects them using TSVs and microbumps. While HBF layers still use proven NAND memory cells, they are organized in multiple arrays to achieve a very high level of parallelism and therefore performance. We do not know whether Kioxia plans to use HBF for the project or stick to something similar. However, it is safe to assume that the knowledge it will gain from its experimentation with HBF to build ultra-high-performance SSDs is something the company intends to leverage.
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