SK hynix Teams Up with SanDisk to Introduce Storage New Standard, AI Storage Sector Sees New Catalyst

BlockBeats News, August 4th. According to SK Hynix's press release on August 4th, SK Hynix and SanDisk have released the first standard specification of HBF (High Bandwidth Flash) through OCP and showcased related AI memory solutions at FMS 2026 held in Santa Clara, California.

HBF is positioned as a new storage layer between HBM and SSD. According to SK Hynix, HBF aims to provide larger capacity with NAND technology while achieving close to HBM's high-speed data transfer capability to address the "memory wall" brought by AI inference expansion. The initial standard covers up to 512GB capacity, based on 8-layer and 16-layer NAND die stacking, with bandwidth divided into three tiers, ranging from approximately 0.4TB/s to 3.0TB/s. In terms of interconnection, UCIe is used, indicating future flexible integration with processors such as GPUs and CPUs.

This release comes amid significant volatility in the memory stock market. In July, AI storage trading cooled sharply, with Barron's reporting that SanDisk and Micron fell by about 47% and 29% respectively during the month, while the Roundhill Memory ETF plunged around 32%. However, as August began, chip stock sentiment started to recover, with the PHLX Semiconductor Index rising over 1% on Monday, NVIDIA up nearly 3%, and Micron and SanDisk also seeing rebounds. The market is simultaneously concerned about overheated valuations from the previous period and continues to look for evidence that AI infrastructure demand has not cooled off.

From this perspective, the significance of the HBF standard is not just a new product release. It points to the next stage of AI infrastructure: computational clusters no longer merely compete in terms of GPU quantity, but memory bandwidth, capacity, power consumption, and data movement efficiency will also become systemic performance bottlenecks. SK Hynix and SanDisk's choice to disclose the standard through OCP is also aimed at promoting HBF as an open ecosystem rather than a single vendor specification. Google and Tenstorrent have already joined the HBF Alliance, and SK Hynix will also discuss with Google DeepMind and SanDisk during FMS on how to overcome memory bottlenecks with HBF.

The press release also revealed that SK Hynix publicly showcased the 10th generation 375-layer 4D NAND wafer and products for the first time, stating a 2.5 times improvement in performance per watt compared to the previous generation. They plan to mass-produce high-performance, high-capacity eSSDs based on this technology early next year. This is new fundamental material for the enterprise SSDs and NAND price increases recently revalued by traders, as well as the AI data center storage demand.