SK hynix and SanDisk Launch First Open High Bandwidth Flash Standard

At the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2026 conference in Santa Clara, California, SK hynix and SanDisk announced the first official specifications for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) through the Open Compute Project. The open standard defines a memory tier that sits between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and solid‑state drives, offering up to 512 GB capacity and bandwidth ranging from 0.4 TB/s to 3 TB/s via the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) interface.

The initiative, supported by industry partners including Google and Tenstorrent, aims to accelerate AI inference workloads by providing a cost‑effective, high‑speed storage layer. Analysts project the HBF market could reach roughly $12 billion by 2030, while competitors such as Samsung and Nvidia are developing alternative solutions.