SK Hynix and SanDisk reveal first specs for High Bandwidth Flash but don't get too excited, you probably won't be able to buy it anytime soon

Date:
Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:20:00 +0000

Description:
The first High Bandwidth Flash spec is here: 512GB stacks at up to 3TB/s.
What isn't here is a ship date, and perhaps more importantly, Nvidia isn't on the participant list.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The first HBF specification defines stacks of up to 512GB with three bandwidth grades from roughly
0.4TB/s to 3.0TB/s, connected to processors over UCIe and published openly through the Open Compute Project Google and Tenstorrent have joined the consortium, but Nvidia is not among the named participants, which matters
more to HBF's prospects as a de facto alternative to increasingly pricey HBM Samples of the first AI inference devices built with HBF are expected to show up in early 2027 SK Hynix and SanDisk have published the first technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash.

Released through the Open Compute Project to coincide with the opening of the Future of Memory and Storage conference, it makes for an impressively fast milestone, arriving six months after the HBF workstream was convened at SanDisk's Milpitas headquarters and a year after the two companies first agreed to standardize the technology. The solution, at least for now, exists only on paper, and has managed to draw two crucial partners to its
consortium: Google and Tenstorrent. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: A promising standard, that focuses on capacity over raw speed
High Bandwidth Flash's specification defines capacities up to 512GB across
two stack configurations, 8-high and 16-high NAND dies, and sorts performance into three grades running from roughly 0.4TB/s to 3.0TB/s.

HBF's pitch, unlike its competition, focuses on capacity rather than raw
speed . A 512GB HBF stack sits against roughly 48GB to 64GB for an HBM4
stack, which is between eight and ten times the capacity, while the top HBF grade's 3.0TB/s lands inside the 2.0 to 3.3TB/s band typical of HBM4. You may like Qualcomm's new High Bandwidth Compute looks to tackle costs of High Bandwidth Memory Samsung has a 16TB PCIe 6.0 SSD coming soon but you won't
be able to use it anyway SanDisk has started sampling the tiny chip that will make 512TB SSDs possible in 2027

It also adopts UCIe, the open chiplet interconnect standard, as the link between an HBF stack and a host processor, enabling the technology to be attached to GPUs and CPUs from different vendors.

What could be challenging is delivering on its promise within a reasonable time; however, SanDisk has been working to a public roadmap since August
2025: first samples of the memory itself in the second half of 2026, and samples of the first AI inference devices built with HBF in early 2027. Neither company updated that schedule with this week's announcement. Are you
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Industry expectations put actual commercialization somewhere between late
2027 and 2028, with the volume of data center demand that would justify the investment arriving closer to 2030, in a cycle that also involves partner testing followed by ramped-up production.

This is despite SanDisk's Hsu telling SDxCentral in May 2026 that working through the Open Compute Project (OCP) let the effort move faster and that "you won't have to wait too long", which is a reasonable thing to say about a standard and a slightly generous thing to say about a product still eighteen months from sampling inside a device.

SK Hynix is equally cagey when it comes to HBF's roadmap: the same document that announces HBF also unveils the company's tenth-generation 375-layer 4D NAND, claims a 2.5x improvement in performance per watt, and states plainly that mass production of enterprise SSDs built on it begins early next year; HBF gets no date mentioned at all. What to read next Qualcomm targets Nvidia, AMD, Huawei with Dragonfly AI accelerator rack loaded with 43TB of LPDDR5x, future generations set to smash 7PB/s bandwidth Teamgroup just launched a
PCIe 6.0 SSD that reaches 28GB/s but you definitely won't be able to use it
on your desktop PC. Key partner to Nvidia, ASML and TSMC brings next-gen RAM and NAND replacements even closer

One interesting thing is that Nvidia is not among the named participants,
even though it dominates the AI accelerator market.

SK Hynix has, however, expanded a strategic partnership with Nvidia covering next-generation memory as recently as July 25, and that might be a sign that things could change, but there is no official confirmation from what is arguably the biggest AI player in the market just yet. Samsung , Micron and Kioxia are likewise absent, with Kioxia pursuing a different approach to the same problem.

When HBF does eventually ship, it will probably not reach consumers in any shape or form until AI hyperscalers are sated and a viable interface for retail users is available to harness the tech. For now, HBF is unveiled but exists only on paper, allowing hyperscalers and accelerator designers to plan ahead for a technology that will become increasingly invaluable as the
compute focus continues to shift from training to inference, with AI data centers coming online. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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