Kioxia CEO Rejects Deeper SK Hynix Partnership and Pledges to Cap NAND Price Hikes
Kioxia CEO Hiroo Ota dismissed proposals for joint manufacturing collaboration with SK Hynix, citing antitrust hurdles and joint-venture complexities with SanDisk. Additionally, Ota instructed Kioxia’s sales team to moderate NAND flash memory price hikes for data center customers to avoid dampening ongoing AI hardware investment. Memory chip prices surged dramatically due to high demand for AI servers, threatening to strain hardware budgets for cloud providers and data center operators. Kioxia's commitment to stabilizing pricing helps maintain sustainable capital expenditure across the AI infrastructure ecosystem without sacrificing long-term market growth. Kioxia’s NAND flash average selling prices jumped 70% quarter-over-quarter in the quarter ending in June, after more than doubling in the previous quarter. To expand production capacity in Japan, Kioxia and SanDisk plan to invest over 5 trillion yen, while Ota emphasized that Kioxia will focus on providing priority technology rather than chasing market share.
## BACKGROUND
NAND flash memory is a non-volatile storage technology widely used in solid-state drives (SSDs) and enterprise storage to retain data when power is turned off. As artificial intelligence workloads expand, hyperscale data centers require vast amounts of high-speed NAND storage alongside DRAM to handle processing and storage demands.