SK Hynix and SanDisk Unveil Groundbreaking AI Memory Standard at FMS 2026
In a significant advancement for artificial intelligence infrastructure, SK hynix and SanDisk have jointly introduced the world’s first open technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2026 conference in Santa Clara, California.
This groundbreaking specification was published through the Open Compute Project (OCP). The HBF standard outlines a new memory tier, designed to bridge the gap between today’s High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and conventional Solid State Drives (SSDs). The specification supports capacities of up to 512GB per device (utilizing 8-high and 16-high NAND die stacks) and three bandwidth grades ranging from approximately 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s. It uses the UCIe chiplet interconnect to interface directly with CPUs and GPUs.
The consortium developing this standard includes major industry players such as Google DeepMind and AI chip startup Tenstorrent. Their goal is to address one of AI’s most urgent bottlenecks: as large language model parameter counts surge into the trillions, the existing HBM capacity on accelerator chips has become both a physical and financial constraint.
At the FMS 2026 conference, SK hynix also publicly unveiled its next-generation tenth-generation (V10) 375-layer 4D NAND for the first time. This new technology boasts a 2.5x improvement in performance per watt over the previous generation. Mass production of enterprise SSDs based on this technology is planned for early next year.