Solidigm, the enterprise storage maker, is laying out where it thinks data center storage is heading — and the answer, in its view, is denser, faster, and increasingly built around AI workloads.
In an interview with Tom's Hardware Premium, Avi Shetty, Solidigm's VP of AI, Solutions & Market Enablement, discussed the company's plans across several fronts. According to Tom's Hardware, the conversation covered high-capacity SSDs, the next generation of Floating-Gate NAND, and PLC memory — a flash technology that packs more bits into each cell to push storage density higher.
Shetty also addressed the move to PCIe 6.0 storage, the newest version of the interface that connects drives to servers and that promises faster data transfer than today's hardware. He touched on liquid-cooled SSDs as well, a sign that storage — like the GPUs around it — is running hot enough in AI systems to warrant the kind of cooling once reserved for high-end processors.
A recurring theme, per Tom's Hardware, is Solidigm's belief that AI will be the engine driving demand for ever-denser NAND flash storage. As AI models grow and consume more data, the company argues, the appetite for capacity will keep climbing.
The interview also referenced Nvidia's Storage Next vision, signaling that storage strategy is increasingly being shaped around the needs of AI accelerators rather than treated as a separate concern.
Why it matters: the AI boom is usually framed around chips and GPUs, but the storage feeding those systems faces its own race for speed, density, and cooling — and how that plays out will help determine how affordably AI can scale.