Kioxia has added direct liquid cooling (DLC) models to its CM9 Series enterprise SSD lineup, targeting servers that use cold plates. The company says the new E3.S DLC drives can also run in traditional air-cooled environments, giving operators a way to standardize on one SSD family across both DLC and air deployments.
The move lands as more data center teams design around direct liquid cooling for higher-power compute nodes, where pulling heat at the cold plate can reduce the burden on room air systems. But DLC-ready components only matter if they integrate cleanly into the mechanical and thermal assumptions of cold-plate-enabled server designs, and storage is part of that bill of materials.
Kioxia is positioning the CM9-DLC models for SSD context caching, and the lineup includes two endurance tiers: read-intensive at 1 DWPD and mixed-use at 3 DWPD.
CM9 Series drives are currently sampling to select customers. Kioxia also plans to showcase the drives at the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose.
Source: Kioxia
