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SK Hynix reportedly pivots from Kioxia toward SanDisk for advanced packaging collaborations
Thursday, February 19, 2026 at 06:40 AM
Speculation regarding SK Hynix shifting its partnership focus away from Kioxia toward SanDisk for hybrid bonding technology developments.
Context
The emergence of High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) marks a strategic shift in the AI hardware landscape as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Western Digital move to address the capacity limits of traditional HBM. While HBM remains the gold standard for high-speed computation, HBF leverages stacked 3D NAND layers to deliver significantly higher storage density at a lower cost. This technology acts as a high-performance bridge between fast DRAM and traditional SSDs, specifically optimized for the massive data-read requirements of AI inference models that exceed current memory capacities.
Market entry is rapidly approaching, with Western Digital expecting to ship HBF samples by late 2026 and launch initial devices in early 2027. Both Samsung and SK Hynix are concurrently targeting commercialization within 2027. For investors, this represents the creation of a new high-margin storage tier within the AI supply chain, potentially easing the supply bottlenecks and extreme capital expenditures currently associated with pure HBM-based architectures.
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