Sandisk has announced the successful tape-out of High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a new memory technology designed to supplement HBM in AI accelerators. The company confirmed that the first HBF inference product samples are currently scheduled for release in 2027.
The HBF project, first presented in February 2025, gained momentum when SK Hynix joined six months later. The partners published the initial specification via the Open Compute Project in August 2026, utilizing stacked NAND layers and a wide interface design.
Industry veteran Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and former architect at Apple and Intel, has joined the technical advisory board. Sandisk claims HBF can double GPU efficiency in specific inference tasks, supporting a shift toward memory-centric AI systems.