Photo: Screenshot from Huawei official website

Chinese tech giant Huawei on Wednesday released new AI solid state disk (SSD) products in Shanghai, aiming to overcome the current performance and capacity bottlenecks of traditional AI storage, enhance AI training efficiency and inference experience, and set a new benchmark in the AI storage field, according to the company.

At a launch event in Shanghai, Zhou Yuefeng, vice-president and head of Huawei's data storage product line, unveiled the high-end Huawei OceanDisk EX/SP/LC series, according to a post on a Huawei Weibo account. 

As AI applications become increasingly widespread, data corpora are shifting from "pure text" to "multimodal," with data volumes growing exponentially. Inference text is also moving from "short sequences" to "multimodal fusion long sequences," further degrading the AI inference experience, according to the post.

"The increasingly severe 'memory wall' and 'capacity wall' have become key bottlenecks to AI training efficiency and user experience. This poses significant challenges to the performance and cost of IT infrastructure, impacting the positive AI business cycle," Zhou said.

Huawei's newly released AI SSD products are high-performance, large-capacity solid-state drives specifically optimized for AI workloads, the post said.

Additionally, Huawei introduced the DiskBooster driver software, which supports intelligent collaboration between AI SSDs and HBM and DDR memory, achieving a 20-fold expansion of virtual pooled memory through memory extension technology. The software also features intelligent multi-stream technology, which, when integrated with upper-layer applications, effectively reduces write amplification, further extending the lifespan of AI SSDs, according to the post.

China is accelerating the development of AI technologies. On Tuesday, the State Council, China's cabinet, released a guideline on deepening the implementation of the AI Plus Initiative to promote the in-depth integration of AI and various industries, vowing to achieve extensive and deep integration of AI with six key areas including sci-tech and consumption by 2027.


Global Times