Kioxia has announced a new family of data centre solid-state drives, the KIOXIA NX1 series, which it describes as its first SSD designed to support direct liquid cooling. The drives use the E1.S form factor and the PCIe 5.0 interface and are positioned for GPU-enabled servers and hyperscale data centre environments.

The engineering claim is modest and specific. Kioxia says the NX1 is the successor to its XD series and delivers roughly 38 per cent more sequential write performance and about 20 per cent more random write performance than the previous generation, on the company's own measurements. It also carries a next-generation controller developed in-house.

Why cooling became a storage problem

As AI accelerators pack more compute into a server, the heat inside the chassis rises, and the memory and storage beside the processors have to survive it. Direct liquid cooling runs coolant to a cold plate on the component rather than moving air across the whole machine, and it only works if the parts are built to take it. That is why a drive being liquid-cooling-capable is a small design change with a large consequence: it lets operators put dense storage where the cooling already is.

Kioxia offers the NX1 in a 9.5 millimetre E1.S version that takes either liquid or air cooling, and a 15 millimetre version for air-cooled systems, and rates the drives for one drive-write per day — a durability grade suited to read-heavy workloads rather than to constant writing.

Performance percentages against a previous generation say nothing about how the drive behaves in a customer's racks, or what it costs. Kioxia has announced the part; the buyers and the volume shipments that would prove demand are still to come.