Huawei enters AI memory race with SSD series

Shortly after releasing UCM (Unified Computing Memory) — an AI inference acceleration toolkit aimed at reducing China’s reliance on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — Huawei is making waves again in the memory sector.

On Wednesday the Shenzhen-based tech giant unveiled new AI solid-state drives (SSDs) in Shanghai. Unlike consumer PC SSDs, these drives are engineered for data centers that handle large-scale AI model training and inference. At the launch, Zhou Yuefeng, vice-president and head of Huawei’s data storage product line, introduced the high-end OceanDisk EX/SP/LC series.

Huawei says AI workloads are driving a shift from purely text-based corpora to multimodal datasets, with data volumes growing exponentially. Inference workloads are likewise evolving from short text sequences to long, fused multimodal sequences, placing heavier demands on memory and I/O performance.

Zhou described the new AI SSDs as high-performance, large-capacity drives optimized specifically for such AI workloads. Complementing the hardware, Huawei also introduced DiskBooster, a driver that enables intelligent coordination among AI SSDs, HBM and DDR memory. DiskBooster’s memory-extension technology can expand virtual pooled memory by up to 20 times, and its intelligent multi-streaming capability — when integrated with higher‑level applications — reduces write amplification and extends SSD lifespan, the company said.

Meanwhile, the State Council on Tuesday issued guidelines to deepen the AI Plus Initiative, aiming to accelerate AI integration across industries. The guidelines set a target of achieving broad, deep integration of AI with six key areas, including science and technology and consumption, by 2027.