On July 30, 2026, Kioxia announced that it has developed the KIOXIA CM10 Series of enterprise SSDs. It is the company's first drive family to support PCIe 6.0, and it uses the tenth generation of BiCS FLASH, built with 332 layers. Support for cooling the drive directly with a cold plate is also new. The product is aimed squarely at AI inference infrastructure, and sampling to select customers has already begun.
SSDs Are Becoming an Extension of GPU Memory
To understand this launch, it helps to look at how the scale of AI models is landing on storage. Parameter counts are heading toward the trillions, and context windows have stretched to millions of tokens. Every inference pass therefore moves far more data than it used to.
That is why there is growing interest in offloading whatever will not fit in GPU memory to extremely fast flash storage. Kioxia built the CM10 Series to work with NVIDIA CMX, NVIDIA's context memory storage architecture. The SSD sits outside the conventional memory hierarchy and acts as a home for context cache. Storage is no longer just a place to keep data; it is being treated as a continuation of memory.
Read Performance Up to Roughly 92 Percent Higher Than the Previous Generation
The performance figures are easy to read. Compared with the previous KIOXIA CM9 Series, sequential read performance is up to approximately 92 percent higher and random read performance up to approximately 85 percent higher. Both are close to double.
The gains are concentrated on the read side, which says a lot about what this drive is for. AI inference and context caching revolve around reading the same data repeatedly, unlike training workloads that write continuously at scale. Moving to a PCIe 6.0 interface supplies the bandwidth needed to make use of that headroom. The drives comply with NVMe 2.1 and the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD Specification v2.7, and they support NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP), which lets the host decide where data is written.
Cooled Directly by a Cold Plate
The second highlight is thermal design. The CM10 Series supports direct liquid cooling (DLC) via a cold plate on the E3.S and 9.5mm E1.S models, while every form factor still works in conventional air-cooled environments.
AI servers have been shifting to liquid cooling to deal with GPU heat, and leaving storage on air cooling alone makes for an awkward rack design. When SSDs can share the same cooling loop, there are fewer constraints around preserving airflow paths inside the chassis, which makes it easier to raise density. It is an unglamorous detail that matters a great deal to data center operators.
Up to 61.44TB, with Two Endurance Options
The lineup spans three form factors: E3.S, E1.S and 2.5-inch. Capacities range from 1.60TB to 61.44TB depending on form factor. Endurance comes in two grades, 1 DWPD for read-intensive workloads and 3 DWPD for mixed-use workloads.
The 2.5-inch model is the exception. It complies with PCIe 5.0 and uses eighth-generation BiCS FLASH, so the combination of PCIe 6.0 and tenth-generation memory is limited to the E3.S and E1.S models.
Security is covered as well. Alongside optional self-encrypting drive (SED) and SIE models, FIPS 140-3 support is planned. The drives also handle CNSA 2.0 compliant post-quantum cryptography, aimed at future quantum attacks, and SPDM v1.4 attestation for verifying device integrity. For equipment expected to run for years, these provisions will matter more over time.
Summary
The CM10 Series is Kioxia's first PCIe 6.0 enterprise SSD, and it brings two new elements: 332-layer tenth-generation BiCS FLASH and direct liquid cooling support. With sequential read performance up to approximately 92 percent higher than the previous generation, capacities up to 61.44TB and NVIDIA CMX compatibility, the target is clearly AI inference infrastructure. The drives are currently sampling to select customers, so specifications may change by the time of mass production. They will be shown at FMS (The Future of Memory and Storage) in Santa Clara, California, from August 4 to 6, 2026.
