Kioxia and Sandisk lift NAND speed 33%

Kioxia and Sandisk have unveiled 9th-generation 2Tb QLC 3D flash with a 4.8Gb/s NAND interface—33% faster than their previous 8th-generation devices. Their joint announcement also points to a six-plane architecture and better read/write power efficiency, though it does not give a shipping date or workload benchmark. The practical signal for AI infrastructure teams is that storage vendors are optimizing the data path alongside accelerators; it is a useful counterweight to the HBM capacity race when profiling retrieval, training-data, and agent-memory bottlenecks.