GMIF 2026 Innovation Summit Spotlights AI-Driven Storage Evolution
The 5th GMIF 2026 Innovation Summit was held in Shenzhen on September 23, co-organized by the Shenzhen Memory Industry Association and the School of Integrated Circuits at Peking University. Professionals from global memory manufacturers, controller chip vendors and storage solution providers gathered to discuss storage technology evolution, industry trends and application innovation in the AI era.
Morgan Stanley Executive Director Yan Zhitian said that as AI capital expenditure continues to grow, the value of storage in AI infrastructure is rising, and storage architecture, advanced packaging and related chip technologies are seeing new innovation opportunities around issues such as the "memory wall". Cai Yimao, Dean of PKU's School of Integrated Circuits, noted that HBF high-bandwidth NAND and multi-media heterogeneous storage architectures could deliver greater value in meeting the growing capacity, bandwidth and cost demands of large-model inference, leveraging HBM, NAND and RRAM together for a balanced path.
Samsung Vice President Kevin Yoon introduced the company's technology roadmap covering Z-NAND, PCIe Gen6 SSDs and ultra-large capacity datacenter SSDs. Sandisk Senior Product Marketing Director Zhang Dan said the growing scale of KV Cache driven by multimodal, long-context and agent models raises NAND Flash's value in AI infrastructure. Arm's global storage business lead John Javier Lionel said AI deployment across cloud, edge and terminal will enable local storage to handle more tasks such as model weights, knowledge bases and application data. Biwin Storage Chairman Sun Chengsi detailed its product portfolio and innovations for cloud, edge and terminal AI scenarios.
Representatives from Lenovo, Jiechuang Intelligent and Yinpu also shared perspectives on "Token factories", AI computing operations and storage tiering in large-model inference. Sun Rixin, President of the Shenzhen Memory Industry Association, said GMIF will continue connecting storage players along the supply chain as well as AI computing and terminal application forces to promote technical exchange and ecosystem cooperation.
