Global data generation: 660ZB by 2030, so SK hynix pre-announces insane 300TB future SSD for AI

SK hynix has announced it's already working on an insane 300TB (yeah, that's 300 terabytes) SSD, with the SSD pre-announced at its press conference in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday.

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SK hynix cited reports from market researchers that the total volume of data generated globally in the AI era -- that's data generated by us, humans, as well as AI -- will absolutely explote to 660ZB (660 zetabytes) in 2030, from the 15ZB generated in 2014.

You can buy 30TB+ HDDs right now, but when it comes to SSDs even the best are topping out at 8TB for the most part. The newer high-end PCIe Gen5-capable M.2 SSDs can push upwards of 14GB/sec but capacities are limited to 8TB, so a gigantic truly next-gen PCIe 6.0 or even PCIe 7.0 SSD with ultra-high-speed transfers double, triple, 5x what we have today, with 300TB capacities? Yeah, wow.

Tom's Hardware reminds us that the Nimbus Data 3.5-inch ExaDrive products arrive in up to 100TB of storage, which is fantastic, but 300TB is a gigantic leap from there.

In the AI age, speed is paramount.... so having 300TB of storage is fantastic, but kinda useless if it needs to be blasted at multiple terabytes per second. SK hynix makes some of the best memory products in the world, all ready for the future of AI.

SK hynix talked up some of its other products during its press conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week, including: next-generation HBM4, HBM4E, CXL Pooled Memory Solutions, Processing-In-Memory solutions, LPDDR6, GDDR7, PIM, and so much more.