This nearly empty server has 1.23 Petabytes of storage

At NVIDIA GTC 2026, we got to see the future of AI, memory, and storage technology from all of the biggest players in the space. And while several hyperscale solutions conjure images of racks and servers as far as the eye can see, at KIOXIA's booth, we saw the opposite. And in many ways, for storage solutions, it was incredibly impressive.

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In a 2U server chassis that normally stores 40 enterprise NVMe SSDs or up to 10 petabytes of capacity, KIOXIA was displaying an almost empty chassis with only five drives. The kicker is that it's a barebones-looking setup that offers 1.23 Petabytes of storage capacity. This is all thanks to KIOXIA's LC9 Series, which introduced the industry's first high-capacity 245.76 TB NVMe SSD for the data center market.

With five KIOXIA LC9 Series 245.76 TB Enterprise NVMe SSDs delivering impressive read throughput of 7,230 MB/s each, for a total of 36.2 GB/s, it's a clear look at just how far the industry has come in high-speed, high-capacity storage at scale.

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As a QLC-based SSD, this setup and solution are ideal for a hybrid cloud or AI server. The KIOXIA LC9 Series is powered by the company's 8th Gen BiCS FLASH with CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology. And this is how you're able to get 32 2-Terabit (Tb) dies densely stacked together.

For AI, these drives can be put to work on systems with large LLM vector databases that utilize retrieval augmented generation (RAG), leveraging KIOXIA's open-source AiSAQ (All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization) solution. This basically lets you use SSD storage to expand costly HBM DRAM capacity. Unfortunately, we weren't able to take one of these efficient and impressive servers home to upgrade our local Plex server and make it a Netflix rival. Maybe next time.