KIOXIA officially announced on the 3rd, U.S. local time, its first GP-series solid-state drive to support direct GPU access to high-speed flash memory—the KIOXIA GP1. Based on Kioxia’s XL-FLASH high-performance, low-latency 3D NAND, the product achieves extreme random read performance of 100M IOPS.
Kioxia stated that the KIOXIA GP1 series is designed to support emerging AI storage architectures that introduce high-speed flash media into GPU memory systems. This approach enables AI systems to access larger datasets at a much lower cost than adding HBM, while also improving GPU utilization.
The KIOXIA GP1 series uses Kioxia’s second-generation XL-FLASH storage-class memory (SCM), enabling finer-grained 512-byte data access. It complies with the PCIe Gen6 and NVMe 2.2 specifications and is available in the EDSFF E3.S and E1.S form factors, with some variants compatible with cold-plate liquid cooling. Endurance can reach up to 50 DWPD. Kioxia plans to begin delivering related samples by the end of 2026.
Neville Ichhaporia, Kioxia’s senior vice president in the United States and general manager of its solid-state drive business, said:
The AI memory bottleneck is a critical challenge that our industry must address as we scale AI deployments and enhance their capabilities.
Kioxia’s XL-FLASH SSDs offer unique advantages, providing the extremely high-performance, low-latency data access required for GPUs to serve as a memory expansion layer. They also offer a significantly lower cost per GB compared with expanding HBM or DRAM capacity within nodes.
The KIOXIA GP1 SSD is a breakthrough product that will give rise to an entirely new, leading AI memory topology and demonstrates Kioxia’s continued commitment to advancing artificial intelligence.