Kioxia Introduces NX1 Series E1.S SSDs Built for AI and Hyperscale Data Centers

Kioxia America has introduced the NX1 Series, a new generation of E1.S PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives for data centers, marking the company's first SSD to support direct liquid cooling. The drives use Kioxia's newly developed in-house controller architecture, which the company says both enables new capabilities now and lays groundwork for future features. The NX1 Series is designed specifically for GPU-equipped servers and large-scale hyperscale data center environments, where performance and power efficiency both matter.

The NX1 Series succeeds Kioxia's previous XD series and takes advantage of PCIe 5.0, the latest generation of the high-speed interface connecting storage to the rest of a server, to help cloud providers and hyperscale operators get more out of their infrastructure while keeping operations efficient. Compared to the prior generation, the new drives deliver up to 38% higher sequential write performance and up to 20% higher random write performance.

The move toward the E1.S form factor, a compact, ruler-style SSD design, reflects a broader trend in AI infrastructure: as servers pack in more accelerators like GPUs, storage needs to keep up in both density and cooling capability. The E1.S design helps maximize how much storage fits into a given space while also supporting advanced thermal management, including cold-plate-compatible direct liquid ...