SanDisk and SK Hynix have jointly launched the HBF (High-Bandwidth Flash) Specification Standardization Alliance at SanDisk's U.S. headquarters, marking the beginning of a global effort to establish HBF as an industry standard. The companies aim to lay the foundation for collaborative AI ecosystem development through this initiative.

The two memory giants are working within the OCP (Open Compute Project) framework, having established a dedicated working group to accelerate HBF standardization and industrial adoption.

As AI shifts toward inference-driven services with surging concurrent users, traditional storage architectures struggle to balance massive data processing efficiency with power requirements. HBF addresses this gap by creating a new memory tier between HBM and SSDs, combining the performance characteristics of HBM with the capacity advantages of solid-state storage.

This complementary storage architecture enables high-performance scaling while significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for AI infrastructure. Industry analysts predict HBF-based integrated memory solutions will see widespread market adoption around 2030, positioning the technology as a critical growth driver in AI storage.

ICgoodFind : The SanDisk-SK Hynix HBF initiative tackles a fundamental bottleneck in AI inference—the gap between ultra-fast but small HBM and large but slower SSDs. By creating a standardized middle tier, they're building the memory hierarchy AI infrastructure truly needs.