Data center semiconductor company FADU, led by CEO Ehyun Nam, announced on the 15th that it revealed the world's first 'File-Semantic SSD' (FS-SSD) at the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose Convention Center, California. The company showcased storage solutions optimized for AI data centers along with its vision for the sector.
The OCP Global Summit is the official annual conference of the Open Compute Project (OCP), the world's largest open data center technology community, founded in 2011. This year's event featured the theme 'Scaling Innovation for the AI Era.' FADU, an OCP member since 2022, presented its new storage technology at its dedicated booth.
Unlike conventional SSDs that manage block addresses, the FS-SSD directly understands and manages files. By equipping file processing firmware on FADU's Gen 6 SSD controller, tasks such as file search, permissions and file-to-address translation, traditionally handled by the server's CPU and operating system, are performed inside the SSD. Accelerators such as GPUs and DPUs, or remote servers over the network, can read and write files directly, bypassing the CPU.
As generative AI and inference workloads grow, repeatedly reading training data and quickly saving checkpoints have become more demanding. FADU says the FS-SSD removes the CPU, memory and software layers on the storage server side, drastically reducing power and costs. The company aims to develop the technology into a DPU-based hostless storage server and scalable file storage, and plans to provide reference designs to OEM and ODM partners. Gen 6 controller performance demonstrations showed up to 2.5 times the performance of the previous Gen 5 controller, with a 16 TB SSD consuming under 28 W when active.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing