SK hynix outlined its business and technology direction at the 2026 Future Forum, held on September 8 at the SUPEX Center on its Icheon Campus. CEO Kwak Noh-Jung stressed that the memory market has shifted from a past ‘straight road’ race to a complex ‘winding road’ that changes moment to moment. He emphasized that success requires not only internal capabilities but also the speed and flexibility to read the pace and direction of external change, urging the company to shift its perspective “from the outside in.”
Phison NT$282.76 billion August
The strategic focus on AI transformation is mirrored by strong market indicators across the industry. Phison reported that its combined revenue for the first eight months of 2026 reached NT$1,642.93 billion, setting new historical highs. August revenue alone hit NT$282.76 billion, a 377% year-on-year increase, driven by rapid growth in AI infrastructure and enterprise-grade storage demand. CEO Pan Jian-Cheng noted that PCIe SSD controller shipments grew 77% month-over-month, indicating sustained expansion in high-speed storage markets (TechNews).
Kioxia GP1 10 million IOPS
The deepening integration of AI into hardware is reshaping partnerships and product architectures. Kioxia’s KIOXIA GP1 PCIe 6.0 SSD received ‘Best of Show’ recognition at FMS 2026 for being optimized for GPU direct access. The drive delivers up to 10 million random read IOPS with 512-byte data access, enabling flash to serve as a high-performance memory extension tier. This architecture helps improve GPU utilization for AI workloads by extending High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with a high-performance flash tier, allowing systems to access larger datasets without relying solely on costly in-node HBM or DRAM expansion.
OpenAI-Samsung joint R&D
Strategic alliances are also evolving beyond simple supply contracts. OpenAI has been expanding its cooperation with Samsung Electronics, extending the relationship to include joint R&D and production of next-generation chips. OpenAI Korea General Manager Harrison Kim stated that the two parties have “made the most significant progress” in next-generation chip development. This trend underscores the industry’s move toward highly specialized, integrated solutions, where advanced packaging and co-development are critical for meeting escalating AI compute demands.
Market shift to integrated AI
The collective evidence suggests that the memory and storage market is entering a phase of extreme complexity, moving away from simple capacity scaling toward highly specialized, integrated solutions. The emphasis on the ‘winding road’ reflects the market’s current need for flexibility, as evidenced by the demand for GPU-optimized SSDs that function as high-performance memory extensions. The sustained, record-high revenue growth. Furthermore, the strategic deepening of partnerships signals that future market leadership will depend less on single-component supply and more on the ability to co-develop and integrate advanced packaging and next-generation chips.