Event: KIOXIA Forum 2026
Dates: November 26, 2026, 13:00-18:00
Location: TODA Hall and Conference Tokyo, TODA Building 4F, 1-7-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Host: Kioxia Corporation
Kioxia’s own half-day forum has one theme this year: “AI evolves through memory.” The pitch is that AI’s bottleneck has moved from compute to data, and that flash storage is where the next gains come from. There’s a conference program and a separate exhibition of Kioxia products and R&D.
Attendance is free, in person, capped at 350, with advance registration. If applications exceed the cap, seats go by lottery and those who miss out can watch online. Kioxia notes that registrations from competitors, individuals and free email addresses may be turned down, so this is an event for customers and partners. Sessions are in Japanese. The venue is a three-minute walk from Kyobashi Station or seven minutes from Tokyo Station’s Yaesu Central exit.
Program
President and CEO Hiroo Ota opens at 13:00. The keynote, at 13:05, is from Masahiko Inami, professor and deputy director at the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, on physical AI seen through human augmentation research.
Kioxia’s own technical session follows at 14:00, with Kenji Yokotsuka of the SSD business unit and Atsushi Inoue of the memory business unit on where flash and SSD technology are heading for AI workloads.
Two case studies come after the break. Daiki Ishida of NVIDIA Japan covers the NVIDIA AI Factory and the data platform under it. Tomohiro Inoue of NTT presents AIOWN, NTT’s distributed AI infrastructure built for data sovereignty, which runs on its IOWN optical network.
A panel at 15:45 brings Daisuke Okanohara, co-founder and CEO of Preferred Networks, together with JAIST professor Shota Imai and Kioxia’s Jun Deguchi on putting AI into real use and what that asks of memory and storage. Networking runs from 16:50 to 18:00.
Why go
NAND is in the middle of a price cycle that has turned memory makers into some of the best-performing stocks of 2026, and Kioxia, with partner SanDisk, is at the center of it. The forum is where Kioxia’s SSD and memory heads talk to Japanese customers directly, and the NVIDIA and NTT case studies show which AI deployments in Japan are buying storage at scale. For anyone selling into or analyzing the Japanese AI infrastructure build-out, it’s an afternoon well spent.
Registration is at sbbit.jp/eventinfo/90469.