New AI Storage Architecture Takes Shape!
$SK hynix(SKHY)$ and $SanDisk Corp.(SNDK)$ Announce the First Standard Specification for HBF
Major South Korean memory manufacturer SK Hynix, in partnership with SanDisk, has officially released the first standard specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a next-generation storage technology. Positioned as a novel storage tier between HBM and solid-state drives (SSDs), HBF delivers high-speed data transfer capabilities similar to HBM while significantly expanding storage capacity through NAND flash memory. Driven by the widespread adoption of AI inference and skyrocketing data processing demands, its advantages of high bandwidth and scalable capacity are drawing intense industry attention.
SK Hynix stated that this milestone specification was developed over approximately six months, following the launch of their HBF standardization partnership in August 2025 and the formation of an alliance in February 2026. The specification defines two capacity configurations using 8-layer and 16-layer stacked NAND flash memory chips, supporting up to 512GB of capacity. It also establishes bandwidth standards across three tiers (Grades 1 to 3), covering data transfer rates ranging from roughly 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s.
Significantly, HBF interfaces with processors using the industry-standard UCIe interconnect, laying the groundwork for flexible connections between HBF and various types of chips, such as GPUs and CPUs. Furthermore, the specification covers interconnect interfaces, electrical characteristics, reliability and packaging guidelines for HBF die stacking, and usage instructions for data read/write software. Formally released by the Open Compute Project (OCP)—the world's largest open data center technology collaboration organization—this standard serves as a universal, open industry specification rather than a proprietary corporate standard.
Currently, SK Hynix plans to accelerate the large-scale commercialization of HBF in the AI storage market and fast-track ecosystem development. The HBF Alliance already includes prominent members such as Google and Tenstorrent. Moving forward, the company will continue to rely on open collaboration to expand its ecosystem while boosting technical maturity and market adoption. SK Hynix emphasized that with the rapid commercialization of agentic AI and an exponential surge in data volumes, demands for processing speed and efficiency continue to rise. Under these conditions, a single memory product can no longer meet market needs, making a "tiered memory" architecture necessary to integrate and synergistically optimize multiple memory types with complementary characteristics.
Of particular note, SK Hynix will also showcase for the first time its advanced tenth-generation (V10) 4D NAND flash memory wafers and products featuring a 375-layer stack. Offering a 2.5x improvement in performance-per-watt compared to the previous generation, it is exceptionally well-suited for AI infrastructure environments with extreme performance and energy-efficiency demands, such as data centers. SK Hynix plans to launch mass production of high-performance, high-capacity enterprise SSDs based on this NAND flash memory in early 2027, further solidifying its leadership in the AI-era NAND flash market.
In addition, the company will exhibit a series of products targeting mobile devices, PCs, automobiles, and robotics, comprehensively demonstrating SK Hynix's memory technology leadership in the AI era and achievements in customer collaboration. Kim Cheon-seong, Vice President at SK Hynix, noted that the rapid popularization of AI applications is driving a critical restructuring of the entire data processing architecture. Through HBF, the company aims to break down the boundaries between memory and storage, helping to build a new architecture that enhances overall system efficiency.
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