High Bandwidth Flash: Bridging the Gap Between Expensive HBM & Flash Memory
At the recent FMS 2026, SK hynix and SanDisk announced the first open technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), formalizing a new memory category that sits between high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and solid-state drives.
FMS 2026: AI Moving Boundaries Between Memory & Storage
The recent FMS 2026 conference in Santa Clara, once organized around flash storage, now functions as an AI memory-and-data-infrastructure conference, confirming a shift that has been building over several product cycles. It’s no wonder the event changed its name from “Flash Memory Summit” to “Future of Memory and Storage.”
Memory & NAND Flash Crisis: May 2026 Update
What began as an AI-driven reallocation of manufacturing capacity toward HBM has compounded through consecutive quarters of record-breaking price increases, affecting enterprise IT budgets, consumer device pricing, and cloud infrastructure spending in equal measure.
MEXT: Predictive Memory Software to Control DRAM Costs
MEXT, a Santa Clara-based startup founded just three years ago, recently launched Predictive Memory, a software-only solution that uses AI-driven prediction to extend effective server memory capacity by treating flash storage as a transparent extension of DRAM.
The company claims its product reduces infrastructure costs by 50% and increases usable memory capacity by 2x to 4x without requiring changes to hardware, operating systems, or applications.
Memory & Flash Crisis: March 2026 Update
The global memory market entered 2026 in a state of structural supply constraint. AI infrastructure demand has reallocated semiconductor manufacturing capacity toward HBM for GPU accelerators, creating scarcity in conventional DRAM and NAND flash products.
Call Notes: Memory & NAND Market Update (Dec 2025)
Just before the Holiday break, I participated in an advisory session on the current state of the memory and NAND market, which is experiencing a marked upturn driven by constrained supply of legacy DRAM products and surging demand from higher-margin products like HBM and DDR5.
Here I’m sharing some of the notes I used for that discussion.
Call Notes: Memory Market Supply Constraints and Rising Prices (Nov 2025)
Legacy and mobile DRAM types, including DDR4 and LPDDR5X, face severely extended delivery lead times, while contract prices for DRAM and NAND flash are rising sharply. This is leaving Smartphone OEMs and SoC vendors with elevated memory cost burdens that threaten margins and will likely force higher device prices.
Call Notes: Q4 Semiconductor Tracker
We’re in a moment that’s less about individual chip performance and more about processing-at-scale. It’s all about sprawling AI racks, optics, interconnect, and custom silicon hungry for scale, speed, and a story.
Research Note: Marvell Solidifies CXL Leadership w/ Ecosystem-Wide Interoperability
The CXL ecosystem is moving quickly from concept to deployment as hyperscalers, OEMs, and chipmakers seek new ways to address the memory bottlenecks that limit AI, cloud, and high-performance computing workloads. In this environment, interoperability is not a checkbox—it is the foundation that determines how quickly new architectures can reach scale.
NAND Insider Newsletter: January 21, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is an excerpt from this week’s.
Research Note: Enfabrica ACF-S Millennium
First detailed at Hot Chips 2024, Enbrica recently announced that its ACF-S “Millennium” chip, which addresses the limitations of traditional networking hardware for AI and accelerated computing workloads, will be available to customers in calendar Q1 2025.