Japan's HBM and semiconductor market accelerates amid AI demand

The Japanese high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market is poised for significant growth, driven by the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and advanced accelerator architectures. Market research indicates the HBM market could reach $31.2 billion by the end of 2035, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 22.7% from 2025.

While major memory manufacturers like SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Micron lead the global HBM supply chain, Japan holds a strategic position within the supporting technical ecosystem. Japanese suppliers provide critical components including semiconductor manufacturing equipment, photoresists, silicon wafers, advanced packaging materials, and bonding technology. Kioxia and SanDisk have also announced plans to invest over $31 billion in Japan by 2032 to meet AI-driven memory demand.

In parallel, Kioxia is evolving its SSD technology to meet the specific needs of AI data centers. The company has identified four key directions for SSD evolution: archive use, data ingestion, training and inference, and specialized applications for NVIDIA storage architectures. Kioxia is developing high-performance solutions, such as the GP series using XL-FLASH technology, aiming for massive increases in random read IOPS to support future AI workloads.