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Kioxia adds liquid-cooling to CM9 SSDs for hot rack environments

What happened

According to Blocks & Files, published Tuesday 13 Oct 2026, Kioxia has made a direct liquid cooling version of its PCIe gen 5 CM9 datacenter SSD, the CM9-DLC, so customers can use the drives inside a hot rack chassis without thermal throttling. The CM9-DLC products have cold-plate, direct liquid cooling support and also support air-cooling, with a liquid-cooled metal enclosure touching the top or both sides of the device, in the E3.S form factor. Maulik Sompura, Senior Staff Director, Product Management, SSD business unit at Kioxia America, said the rise of AI infrastructure is driving a fundamental shift in data center design toward higher power densities and advanced cooling technologies. Deploying liquid-cooled CM9-DLC drives will involve the system builder matching a host server's cold-plate/manifold system and coolant loop, and undergoing qualification; Kioxia does not provide information such as mounting, thermal contact surface or specific cold-plate compatibility, saying only that the drives "support cold-plate-enabled server designs," and system builders should ensure their server chassis complies with standards like the SFF-TA-1008 rev. 3.0a specification. The liquid-cooled CM9 drive performance numbers are the same as for the air-cooled CM9. The CM9 Series drives are currently sampling to select customers and will be showcased at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, taking place October 12 – 15 in San Jose, Calif. Kioxia gave its CM10 series of SSDs liquid-cooling support earlier this year.