FMS 2026: Kioxia Announces Next-Generation E1.S SSDs for AI and Hyperscale Environments

KIOXIA America, Inc. announced the KIOXIA NX1 Series of SSDs, a new gen of E1.S PCIe 5.0 NVMe data center SSDs, and Kioxia’s first SSD with direct liquid cooling support.The KIOXIA NX1 Series features Kioxia’s next-gen, in-house developed controller architecture enabling unique capabilities today while providing a foundation for future features. The new drives are engineered to deliver high-performance, power-efficient storage for GPU-enabled servers and hyperscale data center environments.

E1.S form factor SSDs are becoming increasingly important for AI and hyperscale system designs, keeping high-speed flash storage close to the CPU and GPU.

The KIOXIA NX1 Series is the successor model of the XD series, and leverages PCIe 5.0 performance to help cloud providers and hyperscale operators optimize infrastructure while maintaining operational efficiency. Compared to the previous generation, KIOXIA NX1 SSDs deliver up to 38% higher sequential write performance and up to 20% higher random write performance.

As AI infrastructure continues to scale, storage must keep pace with increasingly dense, accelerator-rich server designs. The E1.S form factor helps maximize storage density while supporting advanced thermal management, including cold-plate-compatible direct liquid cooling configurations that enable efficient heat dissipation in high-performance AI server environments.

Key features of the KIOXIA NX1 Series include:

• Available in E1.S 9.5 mm (supports direct liquid cooling and air cooling) and E1.S 15 mm form factor (supports air cooling)
• Capacities ranging from 1.92 TB to 15.36 TB with read-intensive endurance (1 DWPD)
• Compliant with PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0 and Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD 2.6 specs, as well as NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP) support
• Built with KIOXIA BiCS FLASH gen 8 TLC memory technology utilizing CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture
• Optional TCG Opal-compliant Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) security model 

“E1.S form factor SSDs are becoming increasingly important for AI and hyperscale system designs, keeping high-speed flash storage close to the CPU and GPU,” said Neville Ichhaporia, SVP and GM, SSD business unit, KIOXIA America, Inc. “With the KIOXIA NX1 Series, we’re delivering the performance, thermal flexibility and storage density customers need to support the next gen of GPU-enabled infrastructure.”

The KIOXIA NX1 Series is currently sampling to select hyperscale customers and will be showcased at FMS: the Future of Memory and Storage, taking place August 4 – 6 in Santa Clara, Calif.