[Taiwan Chip News] "Nvidia Develops AI SSD... A Major Opportunity for Taiwan"

Strategy to Resolve AI Bottlenecks and Ease DRAM Supply Constraints
New Opportunities for Taiwan's Memory Industry with Phison's Participation

With the rapid increase in memory demand driven by the spread of artificial intelligence (AI), Nvidia has embarked on the development of a new AI solid-state drive (SSD). Taiwanese SSD controller company Phison has joined the joint development effort, raising expectations within Taiwan's memory industry.

According to local media outlets such as Taiwan Economic Daily News, Phison will participate in the Nvidia-led development of AI SSDs. Until now, Taiwan has not had a significant presence in AI memory segments such as Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). However, with Phison's participation in this Nvidia-led AI SSD project, a Taiwanese company will, for the first time, be involved in the process of establishing new standards by Nvidia.

The E28 SSD controller from Phison, released in June this year. Phison

This new AI SSD is expected to deliver up to 10 times the performance of existing SSDs currently used in AI servers, and is seen as Nvidia's attempt to lead the development of new memory and storage standards. Phison will be responsible for building a 'quasi-memory hierarchy' between memory and storage devices in AI servers, with plans to address storage demand in future space data centers as well. Industry insiders note that Phison already possesses solutions that align with AI SSD architectures, and view this as a continuation of its long-standing achievements in targeting the enterprise and high-performance storage markets.

The internal code name for Nvidia's AI SSD project is reportedly "Storage Next." The goal is to increase performance by about 10 times compared to existing enterprise SSDs, aiming for up to 100 million IOPS (input/output operations per second). Optimized for AI inference workloads, the SSD is expected to be unveiled as a prototype as early as next year, and will be gradually deployed in Nvidia AI servers. Nvidia is also restructuring its overall AI computing architecture, such as integrating Graphics Double Data Rate 7 (GDDR7) memory in the next-generation "Rubin" platform. The development of AI SSDs is seen as an extension of this strategy into the storage domain.

The semiconductor industry points out that, given the limited supply of HBM and DRAM essential for AI computing, the latency and IOPS performance of existing SSDs are insufficient to support real-time AI inference. Nvidia's development of AI SSDs is viewed as a strategy to resolve performance bottlenecks while easing the burden of DRAM supply constraints.

Some analysts believe Nvidia's vision targets not only terrestrial data centers but also, in the long term, highly reliable environments such as space data centers. Phison's storage solutions have previously been validated in space environments through SpaceX missions, and this technological capability and reliability are cited as reasons for their selection.

In the Taiwanese market, it is anticipated that the high durability and reliability required by AI SSDs will further strengthen Phison's competitiveness in the next-generation AI storage sector.

Taiwan Economic Daily News = Reporter Li Mengshan / Translated by The Asia Business Daily

*This column is published as part of a strategic partnership between The Asia Business Daily and Taiwan Economic Daily News.