Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure

Oct 23, 2026 · Industry Insights

High Bandwidth Flash (HBF): A 10x Cost Advantage for Cloud AI Inference?

Alibaba Cloud expert Wu Guanying at the 2026 Advanced Storage Conference presents HBF as a high-bandwidth flash memory offering 8-16x HBM capacity at 1/10 $/GB, suitable for KV cache and model weights in AI inference, but faces challenges in latency, write bandwidth, software stack, and ecosystem maturity, requiring cross-industry collaboration for 2027 sampling and 2028 mass production.