At the 2025 Global Memory Innovation Forum in Shenzhen, China, Samsung confirmed it will ship its next-generation CXL 3.1 and PCIe 6.0 CMM-D storage products. Kevin Yoo, Samsung's Memory BU CTO, outlined a practical timeline for the company's upcoming storage solutions. The PM1763 Gen 6 SSD is expected to launch in early 2026, offering about twice the performance of its predecessor while maintaining power consumption around 25 watts. Following the release of 256 TB Gen 5 drives in 2026, Samsung plans to introduce a 512 TB PCIe Gen 6 unit around 2027 in the 1T EDSFF format. Additionally, a seventh-generation Z-NAND with GIDS, referred to as memory-class storage, is scheduled for 2026.

Samsung had previously showcased its PM1763 256 TB SSD at the Future of Memory Storage 2025 event in August. The company first demonstrated a working prototype of the 256 TB unit, initially hinted at in 2023. However, at the FSM event, it was revealed that the SSD is nearing readiness for market release. With a completely redesigned capacitor, controller, and DRAM layout, it appears Samsung is focusing on optimizing cooling and performance efficiency for these high-capacity drives. High-capacity SSDs are of significant interest to AI labs, especially as data requirements for training continue to grow. The exact timelines and release dates of these SSDs is unknown, and Samsung may change specific date as it irons out any remaining power/thermal issues it encounters in these high-capacity drives.

Samsung is preparing to bring back its Z-NAND high-performance flash, marketing it as a faster and more energy-efficient option for AI workloads that struggle with the gap between memory and mass storage. The company claims that the new Z-NAND can achieve up to 15x the peak performance of conventional NAND while reducing power consumption by approximately 80%. The announcement also introduced a mechanism for GPUs or GPU-based AI accelerators to access Z-NAND directly, a concept similar to DirectStorage in gaming but tailored to transferring large model data between accelerators and persistent media. If true and implemented in real systems, those improvements would make a persistent storage tier that behaves much more like fast memory for selected AI tasks.

Still, the claims come with big question marks because Samsung has not published detailed benchmarks or clear definitions of the performance metrics involved. Historically, Z-NAND has delivered lower access latency and strong IOPS, but only modest gains in raw storage density. High costs have limited its adoption. Intel's 3DXPoint faced similar challenges and was discontinued despite its latency, low queue depth performance, and durability advantages. Meanwhile, rivals are pursuing other paths, with Kioxia pushing XL-FLASH toward very high IOPS and industry groups working on High Bandwidth Flash to boost throughput. The AI-driven demand for faster storage makes the timing more favorable now. Still, the real market impact will depend on verifiable benchmarks, price competitiveness, and ecosystem support, such as software hooks and accelerator integration. If Samsung can meet those conditions, Z-NAND could find a niche in AI infrastructure, but adoption will hinge on practical results rather than marketing numbers.

Toshiba at the Flash Memory Summit announced that it's developing 3D XL-Flash technology - an approach towards the creation of low-latency, 3D NAND that can take on the surging Optane and 3D XPoint memory technologies. Toshiba says the new approach to low-latency NAND could bring latency values down to just 1/10 of current consumer, TLC NAND pricing.

The bet here is on economies of scale - a revised NAND architecture and deployment will still be able to take advantage of the huge fabrication capacity that Toshiba already enjoys (and Samsung, with its Z-NAND, similar in purpose to what Toshiba want to do with XL-Flash), thus avoiding the need for technology and production ramp-up that brought Optane's pricing up. Toshiba will be using its BiCS flash technology, but XL-Flash will be - at least at first - deployed in SLC implementations, so as to improve performance (7 microseconds program time against QLC's 30 microsecond). Of course, this will bring storage density down, but remember the target here is offering Optane-like performance and equal or better density at lower pricing.

Samsung unveiled an M.2 variant of its flagship high-performance Z-SSD. Targeted at workstations, HPCs, and AI servers, the Z-SSD lineup is built around Samsung's proprietary Z-NAND flash memory, that offer "up to 10 times" higher cell read performance than conventional 3D V-NAND (found on drives such as the 960 Pro). This performance is then traded off for the lowest possible latencies and response-times, which can help certain AI applications. The Z-SSD M.2 is built in the M.2-22110 (110 mm-long) form-factor, and features PCI-Express gen 3.0 x4 interface, and takes advantage of the NVMe protocol.

The drive appears to feature an 8-channel controller that's similar to the one that drives the company's PM983 SSD, and not quite the 16-channel controller found on the larger AIC variant of this drive. Available in capacities of 240 GB and 480 GB, the drive offers sequential transfer rates of up to 3200 MB/s reads, with up to 2800 MB/s writes; with an endurance of 30 DWPD. Like its larger siblings, the Z-SSD M.2 comes with a bank of capacitors to offer power-loss protection. The company didn't reveal availability or pricing information.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has launched an 800-gigabyte (GB) solid state storage drive-the SZ985 Z-SSD, for the most advanced enterprise applications including supercomputing for AI analysis. Developed in 2017, the new 800 GB Z-SSD provides the most efficient storage solution for high-speed cache data and log data processing, as well as other enterprise storage applications that are being designed to meet rapidly growing demand within the AI, big data and IoT markets.

"With our leading-edge 800 GB Z-SSD, we expect to contribute significantly to market introductions of next-generation supercomputing systems in the near future, enabling improved IT investment efficiency and exceptional performance," said Jinman Han, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to develop next-generation Z-SSDs with higher density and greater product competitiveness, in order to lead the industry in accelerating growth of the premium SSD market."

As big data usage is becoming ubiquitous, and workload data-sets increase in both size and complexity, new ways of connecting processing resources to storage are being developed. Intel and Micron's partnership in developing 3D XPoint memory came as a way for computer systems to reduce their bottlenecks in storing data for processing, with a particular emphasis on reducing latency. Samsung, however, has enough resources to try and provide alternatives for the emergent market needs, and being one of the most important players in the NAND industry, it seems the company is betting on the Z-NAND wagon.

For now, Z-NAND as it is being developed by Samsung, is expected to be a new rendition of SLC (Single-Level Cell) NAND, with increased controller tweaks and improvements to achieve greater IOPS in both random and sequential workloads. SLC has already been widely used in the SSD market, though in recent years it has been giving way to density-oriented technologies, such as MLC and, more recently, TLC NAND, in an effort to lower the $/GB equation. Z-NAND is a return to the SLC roots, with some very relevant tricks up its sleeve - while 3D XPoint's call to fame was sometimes up to 10x lower latency (in the order of 10/10μs), Z-NAND is also bringing latency to levels hitherto unknown to NAND memory - specifically, to the 12-20/16μs realms.

NAND has come here to stay, and it's market penetration still has a lot of leeway. Samsung, bar none the biggest and best player in the NAND field, is in a uniquely privileged position to develop new technologies and capitalize on them. Remember that Samsung has so many distinct product lines on which to monetize its advancements that any new investment is hardly a make it or break it affair.

Z-NAND is Samsung's answer to other developing technologies such as 3D XPoint, of which Intel has just announced the first commercial product. Z-NAND looks to stand at the intersection between NAND and DRAM, and is more of an evolution of the NAND design than it is a totally new technology (thus distancing itself from the likes of 3D XPoint.)