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Huawei has produced 122 TB SSDs without having access to the latest 100+ layer 3D NAND from mainstream NAND suppliers, and it has done this using proprietary Die-on-Board (DoB) packaging.
DoB is a wafer-level packaging or assembly technology that places dies (NAND dies for example) directly onto a base printed circuit board (PCB). Mainstream SSD suppliers, such as Samsung with V-NAND, Kioxia and Sandisk with BiCS, and Micron, use multi-die stacking inside TSOP, BGA or other packages. These are then soldered on to the base PCB. This is common in high-capacity SSDs which use multi-layer 3D NAND inside the die.
Huawei cannot get access to the latest 3D NAND chips using US tech, as it is on the US Entity List. So, once its stockpile was used up, it has to use Chinese-made NAND from suppliers such as YMTC. Existing TSOP or BGA packaging for its SSDs would put them at a capacity disadvantage compared to mainstream SSDs.
So it has innovated at the board-level packaging area, by stacking NAND dies in a single package directly placed on the board. This gets it greater capacity density than traditional NAND die packaging, through tighter integration of the NAND chips and reduced costs. The challenges in such packaging include thermal management and signal integrity.
An analyst briefing at a Huawei ID Forum 2026 event in Paris talked about three high-capacity SSDs with 61.44 TB and 122.88 TB in production and a future 245 TB version.
The event had an exhibition area, and this included the OceanDisk 1800 Smart Disk Enclosure. An accompanying data sheet mentioned it having 1.47 PB capacity in 2U using “Large capacity SSDs with DoB stacking technology.” A nearby OceanDisk 1610 display mentioned it having up to 2.2 PB from 36 x 61.44 TB SSDs in its 2 RU enclosure
Huawei highlights DoB in a Data Storage 2030 white paper, on page 35, and it’s also mentioned in a prezi.com pitch called “Transforming Enterprise Storage with Huawei OceanStor Dorado.”
DoB is proprietary Huawei technology and provides a 33% capacity density improvement. It is used in the OceanStor Pacific 9926 AFA Scale-out storage with its OceanDisk QLC PCIe gen 4 SSDs and their 61.44 and 122 TB capacities. The number of layers is not disclosed.
An inf.news report discusses three Huawei AI SSDs;
- EX 560 - extreme performance focus: 1.5M random write IOPS, sub-7 microsecs latency, 60 DWPD endurance
- SP 560 - high performance: 600K random write IOPS, sub-7 microsecs latency, 1 DWPD
- LC 560 - capacity focus: 245TB through 36-layer stacking process. 14.7bGB/sec bandwidth
The report says that the 36-layer process “breaks the limitations of the traditional 16-layer process.” Huawei’s AI SSD architecture “integrates an AI acceleration unit into the SSD’s main control chip, enabling simultaneous storage and computing, reducing data transfer energy consumption by 80%.”
Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific 9926 with 36 x 122.88 TB NVMe SSDs, using PCIe gen 5, provides 4.42 PB of raw capacity in its 2 RU chassis; 11 PB effective capacity with 2.5:1 compression. This contrasts with Dell’s 10 PB raw capacity in a 2RU chassis using 40 x Kioxia LC9 QLC NVMe 245.88 TB SSDs. The LC9s are in the E3.L form factor whereas Huawei’s OceanDisk SSDs are in a proprietary, somewhat palm-sized package.
DoB hasn’t yet allowed Huawei to catchup with the 245 TB SSDs from Kioxia and others, which are being sampled by hyperscalers, but it goes a long way towards that.