KIOXIA LC9 Series NVMe SSD is built for the AI era with its massive 122.88 TB capacity

KIOXIA, the inventor of flash memory and pioneer in storage solutions, has announced its new LC9 Series NVMe SSD, available in the popular 2.5-inch form factor. With a storage capacity of a whopping 122.88 Terabytes (TBs), it's also the first SSD from the company to have been built with the latest eighth-generation BiCS FLASH technology with a 2 Tb QLC die and CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology.

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The new KIOXIA LC9 Series NVMe 122.88 TB SSD, image credit KIOXIA

Personally, when I see 122.88 TBs on a single SSD, my mind immediately wanders to being able to install every game in my Steam library, which I accumulated after a decade of seasonal sales. Of course, high-capacity drives are a critical component of building AI systems, training large language models (LLMs), retrieving data for inference, and designing generative AI applications that will drive the future of local and cloud computing.

The KIOXIA LC9 Series NVMe 122.88 TB SSD is an enterprise-class product compliant with the PCIe 5.0 specification, NVMe 2.0, and NVMe-MI. As a high-capacity QLC-based SSD, it's ideal for deploying in a hybrid cloud or AI server. It's also perfect for pairing with KIOXIA's groundbreaking AiSAQ, which uses SSDs instead of RAM to dramatically improve RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) performance.

KIOXIA AiSAQ (All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization) is an open-source solution for scaling AI. The KIOXIA LC9 Series, sporting a 122.88 TB capacity, opens the door to larger datasets and larger-scale AI for more people and organizations thanks to AiSAQ. We got a closer look at KIOXIA AiSAQ at CES 2025, head here to read all about it.

"As AI adoption accelerates and larger LLMs and vector databases become more prevalent, the need for high-capacity SSD storage is surging," commented Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst, Forward Insights. "Advanced storage solutions such as KIOXIA's LC9 Series 122.88 TB SSD will be critical in supporting the growing computational needs of AI models, enabling greater efficiency and innovation."

Here's a breakdown of the KIOXIA LC9 Series SSD's features:

• Dual-port 2.5-inch SSD form factor, 122.88 TB capacity, 0.3 DWPD endurance.
• NVMe 2.0, NVMe-MI and PCIe 5.0 specification-compliant (up to 128 gigatransfers
• per second Gen5 1x4, 2x2 performance capable).
• Features KIOXIA 2 Tb QLC BiCS FLASH generation 8 3D flash memory with CBA
• (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology.