The more stunning AI agents become, the more valuable storage gets! SK Hynix's NAND business landscape is brewing a hundred-billion-dollar U.S. stock IPO.

Title context: The more stunning AI agents become, the more valuable storage gets! SK Hynix's NAND business landscape is brewing a hundred-billion-dollar U.S. stock IPO. Text: Media reports citing information from people familiar with the matter say that Solidigm, a unit of SK Hynix Inc., one of the world's largest memory chip giants, is considering an independent U.S. initial public offering, or U.S. IPO, as early as next year. The expansion of agent applications represented by Muse and Astra is extending the incremental demand for AI infrastructure from model computation to task execution, efficient context management, and massive-scale data storage and retrieval, making enterprise solid-state drives, or enterprise SSDs, an important area to watch in storage investment. Against this backdrop, SK Hynix's Solidigm is considering an IPO in the United States as early as 2027 and is in talks with potential advisers about a listing. People familiar with the matter said the world's second-largest DRAM/NAND memory chip maker is in talks with potential advisers about a U.S. listing of its NAND flash business subsidiary. Because the information has not yet been made public, these people requested anonymity. Some of the people said the listing could value Solidigm at as much as an astonishing $100 billion. They said discussions are still ongoing and details such as the timing and valuation of the listing may change. A U.S. media outlet was the first to disclose details of the talks with banks and the listing timetable, citing people familiar with the matter who were not immediately identified. A spokesperson for Solidigm declined to comment. Solidigm's position in the industry happens to correspond with the trend of AI investment spreading from accelerators to complete data center systems. Its core business involves NAND flash and enterprise SSDs, with products used in cloud computing, servers, and data centers. Earlier, on August 5, CoreWeave announced a multi-year strategic agreement with Solidigm, securing priority supply arrangements for enterprise SSD capacity, and explicitly stated that storage has become a key constraint in AI platform capacity planning. This also means large AI cloud service providers are incorporating storage supply into long-term infrastructure construction plans to ensure that computing, networking, and storage scale up in tandem. For Solidigm, such cooperation helps improve demand visibility and also provides a real customer basis for the independent valuation of its enterprise storage business; the announcement did not disclose the contract amount or specific procurement capacity. In the era of AI inference, the core value chain of enterprise SSDs lies in delivering stable data access capabilities to customers through comprehensive and complete coordination across NAND, controllers, firmware, and system validation: when expensive AI accelerators need continuous access to data, the value of storage is reflected simultaneously in capacity supply, compute utilization, and the operating cost of the entire system. In 2021, SK Hynix acquired Intel Corporation's flash memory chip business and renamed it "Solidigm," and the company made its debut. According to its website, the company produces Beijing Vastdata Technology NAND storage products for data centers, some of which are only the size of a deck of cards yet offer capacities as high as 122TB. In August of this year, the company announced an agreement with CoreWeave to sell enterprise solid-state drive storage capacity to this so-called "neocloud" large AI cloud computing company to support the AI cloud platform of CoreWeave, a leading force in "AI neoclouds." According to its website, other customers include VAST Data, Dell Technologies, Inc. Class C technology, and Chinese internet giant TENCENT. It is understood that this leading storage chip company, headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California, has 13 business locations worldwide, including Mexico, Canada, and China, and more than 2,000 employees. The storage chip components of AI data center server clusters remain the clearest supply bottleneck in the AI computing power industry chain. Market research firm TrendForce estimates that in 2026, server DRAM contract prices will rise by a cumulative 270%, and enterprise SSD prices will rise by a cumulative 235%; in 2027, HBM contract prices may still rise by 70%-140%. These figures reflect the combined effect of AI computing power expansion and storage price increases. TrendForce's latest estimate shows that DRAM and NAND combined will account for 68% of major cloud service providers' capital expenditure in 2027, up from 47% in 2026, driven by both higher procurement volumes and higher prices. In terms of share prices, as of the U.S. stock market close on September 25, 2026, calculated based on the closing prices at the end of 2025, in their respective local currencies and excluding dividends, U.S. storage chip leader Micron (MU.US) has surged about 279.2% cumulatively this year; SK Hynix's Korea-listed shares have risen about 186.0% cumulatively. What exactly is SK Hynix's Solidigm? Solidigm is an enterprise data storage company under SK Hynix headquartered in the United States. Its core main business is solid-state drives (SSDs) based on NAND flash and related storage technologies, with a focus on data centers, cloud computing, and edge AI. It operates as an independently run subsidiary, is headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California, and discloses on its official website that it has 13 business locations worldwide and more than 2,000 employees. Its business foundation comes from Intel Corporation's original NAND flash and SSD business. SK Hynix announced in 2020 that it would acquire the related business for total consideration initially agreed at about $9 billion. The first-stage closing was completed in December 2021, and Solidigm was established to take over product development, manufacturing, and sales for the former Intel Corporation SSD business; the second-stage closing for the remaining NAND technology and manufacturing business was completed on March 27, 2025. Therefore, Solidigm inherited Intel Corporation's long-accumulated enterprise storage technology, engineering team, and customer relationships. Specifically, it delivers complete enterprise SSD products to customers, and the value of a complete SSD comes from the coordination of flash media, controllers, firmware, and system design. NAND is responsible for retaining data even after power loss; controllers and firmware handle data read/write scheduling, error correction, wear management, and performance scheduling; enterprise products also need to meet requirements such as continuous operation, data integrity, write endurance, and stable response times. Solidigm's business capabilities therefore cover storage hardware, firmware, and supporting software, and it optimizes products around customers' actual workloads. Solidigm's main business must be clearly distinguished from SK Hynix's current main business, the HBM business. HBM is a type of high-bandwidth DRAM and mainly provides high-speed data access during runtime for accelerators such as GPUs; Solidigm's core products belong to the NAND flash storage system, used to store large-capacity data and, under appropriate software architectures, to handle some reusable inference cache. The SK Hynix Group covers businesses including DRAM, HBM, NAND, and SSDs. Solidigm represents an important enterprise flash storage platform within it, and the group's entire NAND memory chip business cannot all be attributed to Solidigm. The more advanced and capable AI agents become, the more storage chips must expand on a large scale. The core change brought by Muse and Astra is that a single user instruction can launch a multi-stage, continuously running workflow. Meta disclosed that Muse runs in a dedicated secure virtual machine and can execute tasks across applications; Astra strengthens computer operation, programming, and complex professional work capabilities. A research or development task may continuously trigger information retrieval, file reading, code execution, model inference, and result validation, and generate intermediate results that need to be retained. From an engineering architecture perspective, GPUs and specialized AI accelerators handle model computation, while high-performance CPUs handle browsers, virtual machines, tool execution, and scheduling; enterprise knowledge bases, the data and indexes required for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), work files, and audit records expand memory and persistent storage requirements. As agent penetration increases, it is therefore expected to drive both "computing capability" and "data processing capability." The second layer of incremental storage demand comes from cache management requirements generated by longer contexts and more concurrent tasks. In mainstream Transformer inference architectures, prefill processes input, decoding gradually generates output, and the key-value cache (KV Cache) stores reusable intermediate computation states. High-frequency data needed for active generation is carried by HBM, system DRAM handles buffering, and cache suitable for reuse can be tiered into SSDs and shared flash according to access frequency and latency requirements, then preloaded back into memory. NVIDIA Corporation's CMX architecture has explicitly proposed adding a flash layer for inference context between GPU memory and traditional shared storage. Its economic significance lies in expanding the capacity of context that can be retained and reused, reducing repeated computation and data waiting, thereby supporting more concurrent tasks. Enterprise SSDs have thus gained new application space by participating in the inference runtime process. Solidigm's high-density products form a concrete connection with the above demand. Its D5-P5336 has a maximum capacity of 122.88TB, uses QLC technology, and is mainly aimed at large-capacity, read-intensive workloads such as data lakes and object storage. For data center operators, higher single-drive capacity helps reduce the number of devices needed to achieve the same capacity and optimizes rack space, power supply, and cooling expenses; workloads requiring higher write performance or stricter response latency are handled by matching other SSD products and software configurations. From an investment perspective, Solidigm's strong growth opportunity comes from the expansion of AI data scale, upgrades in enterprise storage configurations, and customers' continued pursuit of cost per unit of capacity and system efficiency. Improvements in model efficiency can in turn lower the cost of completing tasks and attract more work into large AI inference systems; when the expansion of users and task scale exceeds the resource savings per task, demand for computing, storage, networking, and power can continue to grow in tandem.