The South Korean memory giant says these wafer-thin 0.85mm ICs, built on 4D NAND, will start showing up in smartphones by early 2026. They promise sequential read speeds of up to 4.3GB per second, matching the firm’s last-gen 238-layer modules but improving random read and write performance by 15 and 40 per cent respectively. All this while sipping power with seven per cent more efficiency and taking up less space in your phone’s internals.

For anyone keeping track, that’s a lot of improvement for something no thicker than a crisp.

SK hynix reckons these chips will shine brightest when dealing with on-device AI. In case you forgot we are still trapped in 2025’s AI marketing loop, the firm has made sure to mention it roughly once every other sentence. Its press release gushes about “AI technological edge,” “on-device AI,” and how it will let your gadget run neural nets without catching fire or grinding to a halt.

The tech will move into SSDs later in the year. SK hynix president and chief development officer Ahn Hyun said:“We are on track to expand our position as a full-stack AI memory provider in the NAND space.” He also mentioned consumer and data centre drives using this flash will arrive before the year’s out.

Expect the usual suspects like Adata, Kingston and Solidigm to jump aboard, assuming they are not too busy playing NAND Jenga with fewer layers.

Meanwhile, rivals like Samsung are whispering about 400-layer tech while Micron, Kioxia and YMTC lag behind in the multi-layer race. If NAND were a game of Tetris, SK hynix is now playing in expert mode, while everyone else still fiddles with the start screen.