Sandisk and SK hynix unveil HBF memory spec for GPUs

Sandisk and SK hynix introduced a High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) specification promising up to 3 TB/s of bandwidth using stacks of up to 16-Hi NAND, connected via Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), aimed at giving GPUs terabytes of extra memory. Currently only four companies have expressed interest in the technology.

Why it matters: Memory capacity, not just raw compute, is a growing bottleneck for large AI models — a working HBF standard that lets GPUs address terabytes of flash-backed memory could ease that constraint, though limited current industry buy-in suggests it's still early.