KIOXIA Introduces Direct Liquid Cooling Support for Enterprise SSDs

SAN JOSE, Calif., October 12, 2026 – KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the addition of direct liquid cooling (DLC) models to its KIOXIA CM9 Series enterprise SSD lineup to support cold-plate-enabled server designs. The new E3.S DLC models also support traditional air-cooled environments.

As AI and other high-performance enterprise environments continue to advance, direct liquid cooling is becoming increasingly important to address growing computing power demands and associated cooling requirements. In order to fulfill the growing compute demands, increased power requirements are driving the need for innovative heat dissipation solutions. DLC infrastructure can offer significant energy savings compared with conventional air cooling, while enabling more servers to be cooled per rack.

Ideal for SSD Context Caching, the new KIOXIA CM9-DLC models include read-intensive (1 DWPD) and mixed-use (3 DWPD) endurance options.

“The rise of AI infrastructure is driving a fundamental shift in data center design toward higher power densities and advanced cooling technologies,” said Maulik Sompura, Sr. Staff Director, Product Management, SSD business unit, KIOXIA America, Inc. “The KIOXIA CM9-DLC Series addresses these evolving requirements by combining industry-leading enterprise SSD performance with direct liquid cooling support in the E3.S form factor. This enables customers to deploy denser, more energy-efficient AI systems while providing the performance, endurance, and capacity needed for data-intensive workloads, including emerging AI architectures that rely on large-scale memory and KV cache resources.”

KIOXIA CM9-DLC Series SSD highlights include:

• PCIe^® 5.0, NVMe™ 2.0, NVMe-MI™ 1.2c specification compliant
• Support for OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD v2.5 specification
• Dual-port support in the E3.S SSD form factor
• Capacities up to 30.72 TB read-intensive (1 DWPD) and 25.6 TB mixed-use (3 DWPD) endurances
• Sequential performance (128 kibibytes (KiB)/QD32) of up to 14.8 GB/s read and 11 GB/s write
• Random performance (4KiB) of up to 3,400 KIOPS (QD512) and 800 KIOPS (QD32)

KIOXIA CM9 Series drives are currently sampling to select customers and will be showcased at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, taking place October 12 – 15 in San Jose, Calif. For more information, please visit www.kioxia.com, and follow the company on X and LinkedIn^®.

About KIOXIA America, Inc.

KIOXIA America, Inc. is the U.S.-based subsidiary of Kioxia Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid-state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough BiCS FLASH™ 3D technology, Kioxia continues to pioneer innovative memory, SSD and software solutions that enrich people's lives and expand society's horizons. The company's innovative 3D flash memory technology, BiCS FLASH, is shaping the future of storage in high-density applications, including advanced smartphones, PCs, automotive systems, data centers and generative AI systems. For more information, please visit Kioxia.com.

Notes:

Read and write speed may vary depending on various factors such as host devices, software (drivers, OS etc.), and read/write conditions.

Definition of capacity: Kioxia Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 2^40 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. KiB: A kibibyte (KiB) means 2¹⁰, or 1,024 bytes. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.

DWPD: Drive Writes Per Day. One full drive write per day means the drive can be written and re-written to full capacity once a day every day under the specified workload for the specified lifetime.  Actual results may vary due to system configuration, usage and other factors.

"2.5-inch" indicates the form factor compliant to SFF-8201 specification. 

The NVMe and NVMe-MI word marks are registered or unregistered trademarks or service marks of NVM Express, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

PCI Express and PCIe are registered trademarks of PCI-SIG.

OCP and OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT marks are owned by and used with the permission of the Open Compute Project Foundation.

LinkedIn is a trademark of LinkedIn Corporation and its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.

Other company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of third-party companies.

Information in this press release, including product pricing and specifications, content of services, and contact information is current and believed to be accurate on the date of the announcement, but is subject to change without prior notice. Technical and application information contained here is subject to the most recent applicable KIOXIA product specifications.