Kioxia and NVIDIA Develop 100M IOPS SSD by 2027

Company kioxia announced a joint collaboration with NVIDIA on creating a solid-state drive that can provide 100 million random IOPS. The launch of such solutions is planned for 2027. NVIDIA intends to use several such SSDs at once - the total performance will be about 200 million IOPS, which should significantly increase the efficiency of data processing in artificial intelligence systems.

According to Koichi Fukada, technical director of Kioxia's SSD division, the development will be carried out in close coordination with NVIDIA's requests. The new drives will have an interface PCIe 7.0 and will connect directly to GPUs in a peer-to-peer fashion, bypassing traditional server architecture bottlenecks. This solution is designed exclusively for data centers and AI servers, where the fastest possible work with data arrays is required.

Today's top SSDs are capable of reaching around 3 million 4K random IOPS, however, for modern GPU, optimized for "explosive" memory access, this is no longer enough. To solve the problem, Kioxia is considering using XL-Flash, low-latency, high-endurance SLC NAND variants, and new concepts like High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), where multiple NAND chips are stacked with the controller via TSV interfaces. This approach should provide a high level of parallelism and scalability.

If the project is successful, it will be one of the largest steps yet to rethink the role of SSDs in AI infrastructure. While traditional drives remain a bottleneck, the new architecture will allow GPU directly retrieve data at speeds previously impossible for flash memory.