Kioxia Launches First PCIe 6.0 Enterprise SSDs Built on 10th-Generation BiCS FLASH Memory

Kioxia America has introduced the CM10 Series of enterprise solid-state drives, built using the company's newest 10th-generation BiCS FLASH TLC memory. The drives are aimed at demanding enterprise and AI workloads, including AI inference and Key Value (KV) cache storage, and are designed to work with NVIDIA's CMX context memory storage solution, while delivering notable gains in performance, power efficiency, and cooling options compared to the previous generation.

The CM10 Series marks Kioxia's first enterprise SSD to support PCIe 6.0, the newest generation of the high-speed interface connecting storage to the rest of a server, and it also introduces direct cold-plate liquid cooling support, allowing for more efficient cooling in next-generation AI infrastructure. Compared to the prior generation, Kioxia says the CM10 Series delivers roughly 92% higher sequential read performance and about 85% higher random read performance, which should help speed up data-heavy AI inference and enterprise workloads while improving overall system efficiency.

The push behind this comes from how AI is evolving: as models scale toward trillions of parameters and agentic AI systems work with context windows spanning millions of tokens, demand is rising fast for high-performance storage that can handle KV cache, the temporary memory used to store intermediate computation results du...