The Latest SanDisk Enhances Data Storage Capacity with Larger QLC Data Center SSDs

SanDisk will be a separate company again, split off from Western Digital likely before the end of February. At an investor day event executives from the new company gave a report on what to expect. The chart below shows historical trends and expectations for growth in storage capacity of NAND flash. Although AI smartphones and edge inference show 20% CAGR, generative AI and LLM training account for 29% CAGR.

The company showed NAND industry Capex and Capital Intensity from calendar year 2012 projected through 2026, see below. 3D NAND capex spending peaked in 2021 as higher average capital spending was required to meet growth targets. SanDisk said again that the layers race has ended and this has resulted in much lower capex spending in the industry.

SanDisk said that NAND supply growth in slowing and predicts that there will be an undersupply versus demand by the 2^nd half of 2025. SanDisk is developing other ways to increase NAND flash capacity, besides memory layer count. These methods are shown below. As shown, vertical or layer count scaling results in a low improvement in cost per bit, compared to lateral and logical scaling. The architectural scaling, such as CBA can also increase memory density and thus the cost per bit. SanDisk says it leads in lateral, logical and architectural scaling and thus is can provide higher bit density at lower layer count than its competition.

SanDisk said that its testing technology is a competitive advantage using AI-assisted manufacturing testing innovations.

At the recent 2025 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference, ISSCC, Kioxia and SanDisk unveiled the two company’s next generation 3D Flash Memory. Kioxia and SanDisk, which will be officially separated from Western Digital on February 24, share NAND flash development and manufacturing resources.

The next generation NAND products include CMOS directly Bonded to Array, CBA, technology; use the recent Toggle DDR6.0 interface standard, separate Command Address protocol, SCA; and Power Isolated Low-Tapped Termination technology, PI-LTT. An image of the Generation 10 product and its improvements over the prior generation revealed at the ISSCC conference was also shown at the investor day event, below.

The later technology is important for reducing the power consumption of the NAND flash memory. As a result, a 33% increase in NAND interface speed, at 4.8Gb/s, is expected versus the prior Generation 8 NAND flash. Power consumption is reduced by 10% for input and 34% for output. This 10^th generation 3D will have 332 memory layers and should increase bit density by 59% compared to the 218-layers in the 8^th generation product.

Also, at the investor day event SanDisk was showing its high-performance TLC data center SSDs and announced a new QLC capacity data center SSD with storage capacities up to 128TB, see below, which it says will be shipping by Q3 2025. This joins other high capacity QLC data center SSD offerings from SanDisk competitors.

As SanDisk prepares to separate from WDC it shows next generation storage capacity announcements, predicts undersupply by 2H 2025 and announces up to 128TB data center QLC SSDs.