Kioxia Announces Growth Strategy for the AI Inference Era at Investor Day

Kioxia Holdings Corporation, a world leader in memory solutions, today hosted its Investor Day, unveiling a new growth strategy designed to support the backbone of AI infrastructure in the emerging "AI Inference Era." As AI inference enters a phase of full-scale adoption, Kioxia is positioned to drive this transformation with cutting-edge flash memory and SSD products optimized specifically for inference workloads. The company aims to further enhance corporate value through a targeted growth investment strategy centered on the AI market, coupled with a fortified financial foundation. Additionally, Kioxia plans to evaluate shareholder returns based on future excess cumulative free cash flow over multiple years. 

As AI applications transition from the "training phase" to the "inference phase" and evolve into more complex domains, such as agentic and physical AI, the volume of inference processing is projected to increase exponentially. To manage these massive processing loads efficiently, next-generation AI systems are expected to rapidly adopt storage as extended memory for GPUs. In this evolving landscape, flash memory and SSDs are poised to become core structural components of next-generation AI architectures.

To capture this significant growth opportunity, Kioxia is shifting its strategic focus toward the AI infrastructure market while maintaining its robust business foundation in the smartphone and PC sectors. Over the medium to long term, the company aims to increase its sales ratio in the datacenter and enterprise markets to over 60%. Driven by strong demand, Kioxia is fundamentally transforming its business structure—including securing multi-year Long-Term Agreements (LTAs)—to improve revenue visibility and the quality of profits, targeting more stable, highly profitable growth.

To drive this high-quality profitability, Kioxia will allocate approximately 470 billion yen annually to capital expenditures and 230 billion yen annually to research and development over the next three years, focusing heavily on high-growth, high-profit sectors. Through disciplined investment decisions, the company targets industry-leading capital efficiency. Furthermore, driven by strong financial performance in recent months, the company expects to achieve a net cash position during the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. Regarding capital allocation, Kioxia will strengthen its financial soundness while ensuring sufficient liquidity for growth investments in technology development, production facilities, and human capital. Building on these measures, Kioxia will then consider shareholder returns, utilizing excess cumulative free cash flow over multiple years.

Flash memory and SSDs are anticipated to play a critical role in resolving data processing bottlenecks during AI inference. To this end, Kioxia is deploying a comprehensive portfolio of technology and product solutions:

Optimized for storing KV cache (past computational results) to significantly enhance inference efficiency in GPU servers. These SSDs increase data transfer speeds (bandwidth) between the GPUs and storage and support the Context Memory Storage (CMX™) Platform championed by NVIDIA.

Super-high IOPS SSDs that deliver processing performance exceeding 100 million IOPS to effectively expand GPU memory capacity. This series supports NVIDIA’s Storage-Next™ and is highly suited for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) servers that store external knowledge to improve AI response accuracy.

High-capacity SSDs engineered to accommodate the exponential surge in AI-generated data. The current lineup features a groundbreaking 245 terabyte (TB) model.

Furthermore, Kioxia is advancing the development of high-performance, high-capacity, and low-power consuming 3D flash memory that will power these advanced SSDs. The company plans to begin sample shipments of its 10th-generation BiCS FLASH™ this summer, which will be sequentially integrated into product lines including the KIOXIA CM Series.

Under its mission of “uplifting the world with ‘memory,’" Kioxia remains committed to empowering the societal transformations of the AI Inference Era through its memory technologies, driving sustained corporate value and sustainable growth.