Kioxia Holdings and Sandisk said they planned to invest more than $31 billion in Japan through 2032 to boost semiconductor technology and expand production capacity as artificial intelligence increases demand for memory chips.
The companies said the joint, six-year plan is dependent on government support and includes a new production facility at Kioxia’s Kitakami plant in Iwate Prefecture, with that single-site project budgeted at 1.8 trillion yen.
The move continues a long-running NAND-flash partnership between the two firms that has underpinned Japan’s flash-memory industry for decades and follows recent steps to extend their joint venture and scale production for AI workloads.
Kioxia is already manufacturing 10th-generation BiCS Flash memory at Kitakami, a technology the companies developed together and which the announcement cites as central to meeting higher-capacity storage needs in data centres and AI systems.
Kioxia CEO Hiroo Ota and Sandisk CEO David Goeckeler met with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi at the official residence in Tokyo as part of the announcement, signalling Tokyo’s role in securing the package.
