SK Hynix and Sandisk released the first HBF standard specification, Google and Tenstorrent joined the alliance

SK Hynix announced at the FMS 2026 conference the joint release of the first High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) standard specification with Sandisk, just about 6 months after the establishment of their alliance in February this year. The standard is publicly available through OCP and covers key specifications such as capacity (up to 512GB), bandwidth (divided into three levels, with a maximum of approximately 3.0TB/s), and the use of the UCIe interconnect interface. Google and Tenstorrent have confirmed their participation in the HBF alliance.

The HBF technology is positioned as a new storage tier between HBM and SSD, combining HBM-level high-speed transmission with NAND's large capacity expansion capabilities. SK Hynix publicly showcased the 10th generation (V10) 375-layer 4D NAND wafers and products for the first time during the exhibition, achieving a 2.5 times improvement in energy efficiency compared to the previous generation, with mass production expected early next year. During the conference presentation, SK Hynix executives proposed using a "Tiered Memory" architecture to address the data processing challenges of the AI inference era.