SanDisk and Kioxia have extended the joint venture agreements under which they jointly manufacture NAND flash memory in Japan, renewing a partnership that stretches back to the Toshiba Memory era and runs the flagship plants at Yokkaichi and Kitakami. The two companies share fab investment and output, a structure that has survived ownership changes on both sides.
The renewal arrives with the NAND market in an upswing: prices have risen sharply as AI data centres absorb enterprise SSD capacity, the same demand that sits behind SK hynix’s Dalian licence negotiation in today’s file. For SanDisk, now independent since its separation from Western Digital, the venture is its manufacturing base; for Kioxia, it is the funding and volume-sharing mechanism for successive NAND generations.
Extensions of this kind are the memory industry’s quiet strategy documents. They set the investment sharing, and therefore the capacity trajectory, for the next technology nodes, years before the output reaches a market currently short of supply.