On August 4, 2026, at the FMS 2026 conference in California, SK Hynix and SanDisk Corporations unveiled the first specifications of HBF technology. This solution is positioned as an innovative intermediate layer between high-speed HBM memory and traditional SSD solid-state drives. Key technical specifications include a capacity of up to 512 GB with a configuration of eight or sixteen NAND crystals in a stack, as well as bandwidth in the range from 0.4 to 3.0 TB/s. Integration is carried out through the UCIe open interface, which guarantees hardware compatibility with graphics and central processing units from various manufacturers.

The publication of specifications through the Open Compute Project initiative reinforces HBF's status as an industry-wide open standard rather than a proprietary development. The introduction of this technology forms a four-level memory hierarchy in modern AI servers, where HBF effectively fills the gap between RAM and disk arrays. In the infrastructure of large language models, this solution takes care of storing gigabyte context caches and weights of neural networks that do not fit into expensive HBM memory or CXL modules due to strict capacity and cost constraints.

The HBF standardization partnership began in August 2025, and by February 2026, technology giants such as Google and Tenstorrent had joined the consortium. At the same time, at the FMS 2026 booth, SK Hynix demonstrated a prototype of a 375-layer 4D NAND memory of the V10 generation, whose energy efficiency increased 2.5 times compared to its predecessors. Mass production of the corresponding corporate SSDs is planned for early 2027. Against the background of these technological advances, SK Hynix stock prices show high volatility: despite rising by more than 330% since the beginning of the year, the securities have lost about half of their value since the June historical high, which correlates with the general caution of the market, including the recent reduction of the portfolio by the Aschenbrenner fund.