A field notebook on the platters, cells, and file systems holding up the AI build-out, for the people who build and buy that infrastructure, and the leaders they report to.
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DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash claims a 75% cut in HBM and an 87.5% cut in SSD needs for its KV cache, rattling Samsung and SK hynix, CXMT's gross margin tops Micron and SK hynix in Q2, TrendForce logs a 59.5% jump in DRAM industry revenue, JEDEC finalizes the SOCAMM2 memory standard, and Solidigm's IPO clock keeps ticking.
Read Issue 07 →A running log of smaller developments between issues, each with a source. Updated a few times a week.
SanDisk told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that data centers now make up more than half of total NAND demand, and said it has signed eight long-term supply agreements with data center customers over the past nine months covering roughly two-thirds of its fiscal 2028 bit supply. Source ↗
Kioxia CEO Hiroo Ota said he has told sales teams to stop pushing data center customers for further NAND price increases, after the company's average NAND price rose 70% in the June quarter, and ruled out deeper ties with SK hynix beyond their existing joint ventures. Source ↗
Kioxia and SanDisk said they plan to invest more than ¥5 trillion ($33 billion) to expand production at their jointly-owned Japanese NAND fabs, while SK hynix separately earmarked 54 trillion won ($40 billion) for chipmaking expansion in Korea. Source ↗
KB Securities said combined memory inventories at Samsung and SK hynix fell below 10 days of supply in the third quarter, with analyst Kim Dong-won warning that sellable DRAM and NAND volumes could run out next year. Source ↗
Samsung introduced V10 BV-NAND at FMS 2026, the industry's first 400+ layer NAND built with wafer bonding, about 58% denser than its V9 generation. Source ↗
Samsung says a next-gen interface built on its zHBM architecture could deliver roughly 8x the performance of HBM5, extending the roadmap covered in Issue 04's Deep Cut. Source ↗
Most weeks are a fast read. Occasionally, a topic gets the long treatment instead.
This week's numbers, curated news with a "why it matters" take, one rotating deep-dive story, a quick storage/memory term explained, and what's coming up.
Occasional full-market issues covering every enterprise storage vendor, hyperscaler storage, the HDD capacity race, memory and flash, field reliability data, and an optimization playbook.
A visual walkthrough of the data flow from a stored checkpoint to a generated token, and why the memory footprint keeps growing after the model has already loaded.
Read the guide →One email a week on AI storage and memory infrastructure. No fluff, no spam.
One email a week. Unsubscribe link in every issue.