SK hynix Inc. announced today that it has completed development of its high-capacity SSD product, ‘PS1012 U.2’, designed for AI data centers.

As the era of AI accelerates, the demand for high-performance enterprise SSDs (eSSD) is rapidly increasing, and QLC technology, which enables high capacity, has become the industry standard. In line with this trend, SK hynix has developed a 61TB product using this technology and introduced it to the market.

sk hynix PS1012 ssd

SK hynix has been leading the SSD market for AI data centers with Solidigm, a subsidiary which commercialized QLC-based eSSD for the first time in the world. With the development of PS1012, the company expects to build a balanced SSD portfolio, thereby maximizing synergy between the two companies.

With the latest 5th generation (Gen5) PCIe, PS1012 doubles its bandwidth compared to 4th generation based products. As a result, the data transfer speed reaches 32GT/s (Giga-transfers per second), with the sequential read performance of 13GB/s (Gigabyte per second), which is twice that of previous generation products.

In addition, the company developed this product to support the OCP 2.0 version, enhancing its compatibility with various data center server devices of global AI customers.

SK hynix plans to supply the sample of the new product to global server manufacturers within this year for product evaluation, and based on this, it plans to expand its product line to 122TB in the third quarter of next year. The company also aims to lead the SSD market for ultra-high capacity data centers by developing 244TB products based on the world’s highest 321-high 4D NAND developed in November, to overcome the capacity limitations of eSSD.

“SK hynix and Solidigm are strengthening our QLC-based high-capacity SSD lineup to solidify our technological leadership in NAND solutions for AI,” said Ahn Hyun, President and Chief Development Officer of SK hynix. “In the future, we will lay the foundation for growth to become a Full Stack AI memory provider by meeting the diverse needs of AI data center customers based on our high competitiveness in the eSSD field.”