GoKawiil
Tech News
SK hynix confirmed it will build a new US fab for its subsidiary Solidigm to expand production of 3D QLC NAND flash used in high-capacity enterprise SSDs, as AI-driven demand strains existing capacity. However, the company has shelved plans for a Solidigm IPO or pre-IPO funding round, citing market volatility and a semiconductor stock correction. No timeline, output figures, or financing plan have been disclosed.
SK hynix said it has scrapped plans for an initial public offering of its US enterprise SSD unit Solidigm, blaming unfavorable stock market conditions and a semiconductor share price correction. The company confirmed it will still build a new fab for Solidigm in the US to meet rising demand for high-capacity enterprise SSDs, though it has not disclosed the facility's capacity, cost, or timeline.
Kioxia has introduced its LD4-series SSDs in the E1.L form factor, built on BiCS8 3D QLC NAND and targeted at read-heavy hyperscale workloads such as AI storage and object storage. The drives currently ship at up to 30.72TB, but Kioxia says the underlying architecture has been validated to support capacities as high as 122.88TB, without giving a launch timeline for those larger models.
DapuStor introduced a dual-mode firmware for its enterprise J5060 SSD that lets operators carve out a portion of QLC flash to run as pSLC, boosting speed at the cost of capacity. Depending on configuration, users sacrifice 6% to 20% of QLC storage in exchange for random-write performance that's over seven times faster, with the fixed region exposed as its own block device rather than a dynamic cache. The drive, shown at FMS 2026, spans 15.36TB to 122.88TB capacities but still has no announced price, customer, or release date.
Testing by Bilibili channel Homolab found that the 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max, which uses QLC NAND, suffers major performance drops compared to the 512GB TLC-based iPhone 18 Pro. Once its SLC and secondary TLC caches are exhausted, sustained writes fall to about 79.4 MB/s and can dip as low as 25.6 MB/s, worsening to just 1.1 MB/s once the drive is 60% full.