KIOXIA unveils liquid‑cooled AI SSD as data‑center storage race heats up

KIOXIA Corporation announced the KIOXIA NX1 series, a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD with direct liquid‑cooling and an E1.S form factor designed for AI servers and hyperscale data centers. The drive offers up to a 38 % increase in sequential read performance over the previous generation and is already being sampled to select hyper‑scale customers.

Microchip Technology and Micron Technology presented a PCIe Gen 6 storage architecture that pairs Microchip’s Switchtec Gen 6 switches with Micron’s 9650 SSD. The solution doubles bandwidth to 64 GT/s per lane, uses 3 nm switch silicon, and incorporates hardware root‑of‑trust security features.

KIOXIA also introduced the GP1 PCIe 6.0 SSD, targeting GPU memory extension with up to 10 million IOPS for small‑file random reads, leveraging second‑generation XL‑FLASH NAND and supporting E3.S/E1.S form factors.

Separately, KIOXIA began sample shipments of 1 Tb 9th‑generation BiCS FLASH TLC devices, featuring a 230‑layer stack and 33 % faster NAND interface than the prior generation. Marvell detailed its Bravera SC6 PCIe 6.0 SSD controller, which provides 16 NAND channels, 15 processing cores, and support for up to 25 GB/s+ enterprise SSD speeds, with sampling slated for Q4 2026. Together, these announcements aim to meet the rising bandwidth, latency, power‑efficiency, and security demands of AI, HPC, and cloud data‑center workloads.