Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia Holdings has begun shipping next-generation NAND flash with low power consumption and large capacity.
On the 3rd, according to Japan's Kyodo News and others, Kioxia recently began shipping its 10th-generation 3D NAND flash. The product's data processing speed is 4.8 GB (gigabytes) per second, about 30% faster than the previous generation, and its power efficiency is also improved by 30%.
Kioxia plans to begin mass production of the product next year at the second manufacturing building of its Kitakami plant in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. When the second building goes fully online, the Kitakami plant's production capacity is expected to double compared with the existing level.
The new product adopts Kioxia's core technology, "CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array)." CBA is a technology that fabricates memory cells and control circuits (CMOS) on separate wafers and then bonds them, and it is regarded as a next-generation 3D NAND core technology that can boost data processing performance and integration density.
Ota Hiroo, president of Kioxia, said demand for high-performance NAND flash for AI servers is rapidly increasing amid the recent spread of artificial intelligence (AI), and said the company will move to expand production capacity to respond to market growth.
In the industry, the spread of Generative AI is seen as ushering the NAND flash market into a new growth phase as demand increases to store and process large-scale data. NAND flash, along with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used for AI computation, is drawing attention as a key memory responsible for data storage. Buoyed by expectations of expanding AI demand, Kioxia's corporate value has surged recently to the point where it is competing with Toyota Motor for the top spot in market capitalization on Japan's stock market.