"Breaking the AI Bottleneck"... Samsung and SK Go Head-to-Head in 'Memory Technology Showdown' at World's Largest Semiconductor Exhibition (Comprehensive)

Keynote Speeches at FMS 2026

SK hynix: "HBF and Tiered Memory"

Samsung: "IDM Integrated Portfolio"

SK hynix and Samsung Electronics are set to compete for leadership in the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure market at the world's largest semiconductor exhibition.

On the 4th (local time), SK hynix, together with SanDisk, unveiled the first standard specification of HBF, a next-generation storage technology, at FMS (Future of Memory and Storage) 2026, the world's largest memory and storage exhibition held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, USA. SK hynix

On August 4 (local time), SK hynix will unveil the first standard specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a new memory combining the high-speed advantage of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and the large-capacity storage of solid-state drives (SSD), alongside US semiconductor company SanDisk at FMS (Future of Memory and Storage) 2026, the world's largest memory and storage exhibition, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, USA. HBF stacks NAND flash to significantly increase storage capacity while facilitating fast data transfer. This technology is considered particularly well-suited for the rapidly growing data processing demands of AI services. The specification is being announced about six months after the two companies formed a consortium.

This standard allows NAND to be stacked in either 8-layer or 16-layer configurations, providing up to 512 gigabytes (GB) of capacity. The maximum data transfer rate is up to 3 terabytes per second (TB/s). As an open standard, it can be connected to any type of graphics processing unit (GPU) or central processing unit (CPU), suggesting that it will be widely adopted across the industry. The release took place through the Open Compute Project (OCP), an open data center technology consortium. On this day, SK hynix, through a keynote speech by Chunseong Kim, Executive Vice President and Head of Solution Development, also introduced its concept for a tiered memory architecture that connects various memories as one. The exhibition booth showcases for the first time the 10th generation (V10) 375-layer NAND currently under development. This new product is 2.5 times more energy efficient than the previous generation, with mass production of enterprise SSDs (eSSD) utilizing this technology scheduled for early next year.

Samsung Electronics HBM4E 12-Stack Product. Samsung Electronics

Samsung Electronics is unveiling a strategy centered around memory technology for AI infrastructure. The company believes that the traditional approach, which relied solely on computing devices, is inadequate for processing the massive volumes of data required by AI. In their keynote speeches, Jin Yeob Lee, Executive Vice President and Head of Flash Development at the Memory Business Division, and Kyung Ryoon Kim, Senior Vice President and Head of DRAM Development, will highlight Samsung's comprehensive capabilities as an integrated device manufacturer (IDM)—spanning memory, NAND flash, controller foundries, and advanced packaging—as key to resolving AI data bottlenecks.

At the booth, Samsung will prominently feature next-generation HBM4E for data centers and its higher-capacity CXL Memory Module (CMM-D). In storage solutions, the company will unveil PCIe 6th generation (Gen6) SSDs with speeds twice as fast as previous offerings and a 256-terabyte (TB) Quad-Level Cell (QLC) SSD capable of storing 50,000 movies. Also on display are processing-in-memory (PIM) technology based on LPDDR5X for smartphones and laptops, next-generation low-power memory LPDDR6, and UFS 5.0 for mobile applications. Through this exhibition, Samsung Electronics aims to emphasize its comprehensive technological capabilities—spanning from memory to packaging and foundry services.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.