KIOXIA Europe GmbH has expanded its CM9 Series enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) lineup with new direct liquid cooling (DLC) models designed to support cold-plate-cooled server architectures. Available in the E3.S form factor, the drives are also compatible with traditional air-cooled environments.
The introduction comes as AI workloads and other high-performance computing applications increase demand for processing power and memory capacity, placing greater pressure on data centre cooling infrastructure. As server power requirements rise and computing systems become more densely packed, efficient heat dissipation is becoming an increasingly important consideration for data centre operators.
Direct liquid cooling can improve heat management and reduce energy consumption compared with conventional air cooling, while potentially allowing more servers to be deployed within a rack. KIOXIA’s new CM9-DLC models are designed to support this transition while delivering the storage performance required by demanding enterprise workloads.
The drives are intended to support SSD context caching, which can help address memory capacity constraints in AI infrastructure by providing an additional tier of high-performance storage alongside limited GPU high-bandwidth memory (HBM).
“Scaling AI infrastructure is not simply about adding more compute – it also means finding more efficient ways to manage growing memory requirements and the heat generated by increasingly dense systems,” said Paul Rowan, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at KIOXIA Europe GmbH.
“The KIOXIA CM9-DLC Series addresses both sides of that equation, providing high-performance flash for SSD context caching that can relieve pressure on limited GPU HBM capacity, while supporting the transition towards direct liquid cooling in next-generation data centres.”
The CM9-DLC Series will be available in two endurance configurations to address different workload requirements: read-intensive models rated at one drive write per day (1 DWPD) and mixed-use models rated at three drive writes per day (3 DWPD).
Key specifications include support for PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0 and NVMe-MI 1.2c, along with compliance with the Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD Specification v2.5. The E3.S drives also support dual-port connectivity.
Capacity reaches up to 30.72TB for the read-intensive models and 25.6TB for the mixed-use variants. Sequential performance, measured at a 128KiB block size and queue depth of 32, reaches up to 14.8GB/s for reads and 11GB/s for writes.
For random workloads, the drives deliver up to 3.4 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) for reads at a 4KiB block size and queue depth of 512, alongside write performance of up to 800,000 IOPS at a queue depth of 32. KIOXIA CM9 Series drives are currently being sampled to selected customers. The company is showcasing the technology at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, taking place from 12 to 15 October in San Jose, California.
With the addition of direct liquid cooling support, KIOXIA is extending its enterprise SSD portfolio to address the evolving thermal and storage requirements of AI-focused data centres, where high-performance flash and more efficient cooling are becoming increasingly important to infrastructure design.
