Kioxia Holdings is pouring more than ¥1 trillion (roughly $6.8B at current exchange rates) into a new manufacturing building at its Kitakami Plant in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. The investment targets next-generation NAND flash memory production, the kind of storage that keeps AI data centers and cloud infrastructure humming.
What Kioxia is building and why
The Kitakami site already houses two operational fabs. Fab1 has been running since 2020, while Fab2 came online in September 2025 with a focus on 10th-generation, 332-layer BiCS FLASH production. Sample shipments of those cutting-edge 332-layer products began on July 3, 2026. Full-scale production is expected to follow once Kioxia’s team finishes evaluating market conditions.
This new third building will extend the Kitakami campus further, giving Kioxia additional capacity to produce advanced 3D NAND flash memory. The expansion is squarely aimed at the storage needs created by AI workloads.
Kioxia President and CEO Hiroo Ota has identified the Kitakami site as strategically ideal for this kind of growth.
The spending blueprint
This ¥1 trillion commitment fits within a broader capital expenditure strategy that Kioxia has mapped out through fiscal year 2028. The company is targeting an average annual capex of approximately ¥470 billion from FY2026 to FY2028. That figure represents a 66% increase from FY2025 spending levels.
The Japanese government has been a willing partner in this expansion. In 2024, approximately ¥243 billion in subsidies were approved for advanced 3D NAND capacity expansion across Kioxia’s operations.
Why AI is rewriting the storage playbook
3D NAND flash sits at the heart of AI data center infrastructure. It’s the technology inside the solid-state drives that equip modern data centers, offering the speed and energy efficiency that spinning hard drives cannot match at scale. As AI workloads grow, so does the need for higher-capacity, more power-efficient NAND.
Market ripple effects
Kioxia went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2024 after years as a private entity following the 2018 sale from Toshiba.