Kioxia is a Japanese NAND flash memory manufacturer, formerly the Toshiba Memory division, and one of the largest flash storage companies in the world. NAND flash is the underlying technology in solid-state drives used for storage in data centers, laptops, and mobile devices. Kioxia IPO'd on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in October 2024.

AI data centers require substantial NAND storage for training datasets and model checkpoints. Training large language models involves reading enormous volumes of data from storage repeatedly throughout a training run. Model weights and optimizer states must be checkpointed regularly to guard against hardware failures during runs that may last weeks. These workloads require large storage capacity and high sequential read throughput, and the scale of modern AI training clusters has made storage procurement a significant line item in AI infrastructure buildouts.

Kioxia has been shipping QLC (quad-level cell) NAND products optimized for the sequential read-heavy access patterns of AI training storage, where the cost-per-gigabyte efficiency of QLC is advantageous. The company is expanding manufacturing capacity to serve hyperscaler AI storage procurement and is developing next-generation ULC products for future AI storage applications. Revenue is growing as hyperscalers increase storage provisioning alongside GPU cluster expansion.