SK Hynix and SanDisk Publish High Bandwidth Flash Standard

A new industry standard for a memory technology designed to overcome a critical bottleneck in artificial intelligence systems was unveiled on August 4, 2026, in Santa Clara, California. Memory manufacturers SK hynix and SanDisk introduced the first technical specifications for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), positioning it as a solution to bridge the performance gap between high-speed memory and high-capacity storage in AI accelerators.

The announcement was made at the Future of Memory and Storage 2026 exhibition, where the companies presented HBF as a key technology for the AI era. The standard defines a memory type that uses vertically stacked NAND flash dies, similar to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) but with dramatically greater capacity. It is designed to sit between HBM and solid-state drives, offering the large storage of NAND flash with significantly higher bandwidth than traditional SSDs.

According to the specifications, HBF supports configurations stacking eight or 16 NAND dies, with capacities reaching up to 512GB per stack. Bandwidth is classified into three grades, ranging from approximately 0.4 terabytes per second to 3.0 terabytes per second. The companies state this...