Huawei produces 122TB SSDs using proprietary packaging to work around US semiconductor restrictions

Huawei has produced a 122TB SSD using its proprietary chip-packaging technology known as Die-on-Board (DoB), without access to the latest 100-plus-layer 3D NAND from mainstream suppliers. According to BLOCKS&FILES, US restrictions have forced Huawei to rely more heavily on domestic suppliers for its NAND needs.

Once Huawei's existing stockpile of US 3D NAND chips was exhausted, it turned to Chinese-made NAND from suppliers such as YMTC. Rather than accepting the capacity disadvantage of existing TSOP or BGA packaging, Huawei focused on board-level packaging innovation to improve capacity density by enabling tighter NAND integration.

DoB is a wafer-level packaging technology that mounts semiconductor dies directly onto a base PCB. Mainstream SSD suppliers like Samsung with V-NAND, Kioxia and Sandisk with BiCS, and Micron typically use multi-die stacking inside TSOP, BGA, or other packages before mounting them onto a base PCB. DoB enables more flexible die stacking and shorter interconnects, improving both performance and power efficiency compared to traditional packaging approaches, with a 33% improvement in capacity density, though the number of stacked layers remains undisclosed.

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While DoB has yet to bring Huawei on par with the 245TB SSDs from Kioxia and other suppliers currently being tested by hyperscalers, it is a significant achievement given the restrictions Huawei has faced in acquiring advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment and materials.

The technology has already been deployed in Huawei products, including the OceanStor Pacific 9926 AFA scale-out storage systems paired with OceanDisk QLC PCIe Gen4 SSDs. An analyst briefing at the Huawei ID Forum 2026 in Paris outlined SSDs with capacities of 61.44TB and 122.88TB already in production, as well as a future 245TB version.

That said, the 122TB capacity places this SSD among the highest-density enterprise storage products available globally, targeting data centers and enterprise storage applications where maximum capacity per server rack is critical. Huawei has not disclosed pricing or availability timelines.