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Wafricnews - June 14, 2025

In an eye-opening revelation, Wallace C. Kuo, CEO of Silicon Motion Inc. (SMI), has claimed that Nvidia is now working closely with partners to develop AI-optimized SSDs capable of hitting an astonishing 100 million IOPS (input/output operations per second) — a performance leap that could dramatically reduce bottlenecks in AI systems.

“Right now, they are aiming for 100 million IOPS — which is huge,” Kuo said in an exclusive chat with Tom’s Hardware.

Why the mad rush? With Nvidia’s B200 GPU already running on lightning-fast HBM3E memory at 8 TB/s, storage is quickly becoming the weak link in AI training and inference. Today’s PCIe 5.0 SSDs max out at around 14.5 GB/s and 2–3 million IOPS. But AI workloads are not just about bandwidth — they rely heavily on small, random reads, where latency is king.

That’s where the race to 100 million IOPS begins.

Enter Kioxia, a known name in the storage world. The company is cooking up a next-gen ‘AI SSD’ powered by XL-Flash memory — promising 10 million IOPS in 512B random reads and set to land in the second half of next year, possibly aligning with Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform.

But here’s the twist — getting to 100 million IOPS on a single SSD using today’s NAND technology is, as Kuo puts it, “extremely hard.”

“They’re likely looking for a new kind of memory,” he hinted. “Optane could’ve been perfect, but it’s no longer around. Everyone’s now experimenting — Kioxia’s XL-NAND, SanDisk’s High Bandwidth Flash — but none of it looks truly ready to break that ceiling affordably.”

While industry players like Micron and SanDisk explore alternative non-volatile memory technologies, Kuo’s message is clear: a breakthrough is needed, not just in performance, but in cost-efficiency and scalability too.

For now, the AI dream of eliminating GPU bottlenecks with superfast SSDs is still in the lab — but the groundwork is being laid.

Stay tuned. The next-gen AI revolution won’t just be powered by faster chips — it’ll ride on storage that breathes speed.


By Wafricnews Desk.

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