KIOXIA Europe GmbH has announced the KIOXIA NX1 Series, a new generation of E1.S PCIe 5.0 NVMe data centre solid-state drives (SSDs) designed to meet the growing storage demands of AI workloads and hyperscale data centres. The new range also marks KIOXIA’s first SSD to support direct liquid cooling.
Built on KIOXIA’s next-generation in-house controller architecture, the NX1 Series is designed to deliver high-performance, power-efficient storage for GPU-enabled servers and AI infrastructure while providing a foundation for future capabilities.
The new SSDs succeed the KIOXIA XD Series and leverage PCIe 5.0 to improve performance for cloud service providers and hyperscale operators. According to the company, the drives deliver up to 38% higher sequential write performance and up to 20% higher random write performance compared to the previous generation.
As AI deployments continue to drive denser, accelerator-rich server designs, the NX1 Series adopts the E1.S form factor to maximise storage density while supporting advanced thermal management. The drives are compatible with cold-plate direct liquid cooling systems, enabling more efficient heat dissipation in high-performance AI server environments, while also supporting conventional air cooling.
“The KIOXIA NX1 Series is designed to enable this transition with direct liquid cooling capabilities and high-performance, power-efficient performance,” said Paul Rowan, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at KIOXIA Europe GmbH.
The SSDs will be available in E1.S 9.5 mm and 15 mm form factors, with capacities ranging from 1.92TB to 15.36TB for read-intensive workloads rated at one drive write per day (DWPD). The series complies with PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0 and Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD 2.6 specifications, while also supporting NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP).
The drives are built using KIOXIA’s eighth-generation BiCS FLASH TLC memory with CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture and will also be offered with an optional TCG Opal-compliant self-encrypting drive (SED) security model.
The KIOXIA NX1 Series is currently sampling with select hyperscale customers and will be showcased at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference in Santa Clara, California, from August 4–6, 2026.
