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KIOXIA America announced the CM9-DLC today, a set of direct liquid cooling (DLC) models in its CM9 Series of PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs. The E3.S drives mount adjacent to cold plates in liquid-cooled servers and also run just fine in air-cooled systems. Capacities reach 30.72TB in the read-intensive (1 DWPD) version and 25.6TB in the mixed-use (3 DWPD) version, and KIOXIA is positioning both for AI servers that use SSDs for context caching. Liquid cooling support is spreading quickly across KIOXIA’s data center lineup. The NX1 Series introduced it in July on 9.5mm E1.S drives, limited to read-intensive models up to 15.36TB, and KIOXIA lists DLC support for E1.S and E3.S versions of its PCIe 6.0 CM10. The CM9-DLC brings the Gen5 CM9 line the option of both endurance tiers and the dual-port design CM9 uses for high-availability systems. The drives follow the SFF-TA-1008 rev. 3.0a specification for liquid cooling support. KIOXIA ties the launch to rising rack power in AI servers, where cold-plate loops that already cool the CPUs and GPUs typically remove heat more efficiently than fans. DLC infrastructure can save energy compared with air cooling and allow more servers to be cooled per rack, while air-cooling support lets the same drive go into servers that are not liquid-cooled. “The rise of AI infrastructure is driving a fundamental shift in data center design toward higher power densities and advanced cooling technologies,” said Maulik Sompura, Sr. Staff Director, Product Management, SSD business unit, KIOXIA America. Sompura added that the drives target data-intensive workloads, including AI architectures that rely on large-scale memory and KV cache resources. KIOXIA CM9-DLC Specifications The performance figures match what KIOXIA publishes for the air-cooled CM9 E3.S drives at 7.68TB, 12.8TB, 15.36TB, and 30.72TB, so the cold-plate option costs nothing on the spec sheet. The largest read-intensive model gives up the most: the 30.72TB drive drops to 2,750K random read IOPS and 270K random write IOPS, against 3,400K and 540K for the 15.36TB model. KIOXIA has not published power figures for the DLC models. KIOXIA says it is currently sampling CM9 Series drives for select customers and will show the CM9-DLC at the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose, running October 12 to 15. Pricing and general availability dates were not announced.
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