At FMS 2026 in Santa Clara, held from Aug. 4 to Aug. 6, storage vendors used the industry’s largest independent storage conference to show how AI system design is pushing memory and storage into a more central role. SK hynix and Sandisk introduced the first standard specification for High Bandwidth Flash, or HBF, through the Open Compute Project, with support for 8-high and 16-high stacks and capacity of up to 512GB per package. The product’s read bandwidth ranges from 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s, putting the top end into HBM4 territory, though it was presented as an added tier below HBM rather than a replacement for it. Samsung unveiled its V10 BV-NAND with more than 400 layers and said it was the industry’s first use of wafer bonding for that route, while also previewing zHBM and zNAND-O as concepts that have not entered mass production. Kioxia, for its part, introduced the CM10, described as the first enterprise SSD to combine PCIe 6.0, 332-layer BiCS10 and direct cold-plate liquid cooling. The report also said Samsung plans to raise monthly HBM output from about 170,000 wafers to about 250,000 wafers, with the target set for the end of 2026.

WhiteLine Daily said the launch of a public HBF specification matters because it turns the concept from a single-company proposal into a shared industry standard. SK hynix and SanDisk published the first HBF technical specification through the Open Compute Project, defining 8-layer and 16-layer NAND stacks, capacities of up to 512GB per package, bandwidth tiers of roughly 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s, and UCIe connectivity to CPUs, GPUs and other accelerators. Google and Tenstorrent have also joined the HBF consortium. The report argues that HBF is not meant to replace HBM. Instead, it adds a new memory tier between HBM and SSD, placing larger-capacity storage closer to xPU compute. High-frequency, latency-sensitive data would still remain in HBM or DRAM, while model weights with lower access frequency could sit in HBF. That setup may be especially relevant for MoE models, where many expert weights stay idle most of the time yet still consume capacity. WhiteLine Daily said the short-term investment angle is still not HBF revenue, since first HBF samples are scheduled for the second half of 2026 and the first inference device samples using HBF are expected in early 2027. The nearer catalysts are SanDisk’s earnings, NAND pricing, data center demand, margins, customer agreements, and enterprise SSD progress.

SK hynix said at FMS 2026 that it has jointly released the first High Bandwidth Flash, or HBF, standard specification with Sandisk, roughly six months after the two companies formed the alliance in February this year. The specification has been disclosed through the Open Compute Project and sets out key parameters including capacities of up to 512GB, three bandwidth tiers topping out at about 3.0TB/s, and use of the UCIe interconnect interface. Google and Tenstorrent have confirmed they are joining the HBF alliance. The technology is positioned as a new storage tier between high-bandwidth memory and SSDs, combining HBM-class transfer speeds with NAND’s larger capacity scaling. During the event, SK hynix also publicly showed its 10th-generation V10 375-layer 4D NAND wafer and related product for the first time, saying energy efficiency is 2.5 times better than the previous generation and that mass production is expected early next year. In a conference presentation, an SK hynix executive also outlined a tiered memory architecture as a way to address data-processing demands in the AI inference era.