Kioxia Holdings is building a new fabrication facility at its manufacturing site in Iwate prefecture, Japan, with an expected investment of 1 trillion yen ($6.27 billion) to expand production of memory chips for artificial intelligence applications, according to reports.
The facility represents a direct response to sustained demand for storage capacity tied to AI infrastructure buildouts. Kioxia is a major supplier of NAND flash memory and 3D DRAM to data center operators and cloud providers, competing with Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix and Intel in a market where capacity constraints have persisted since 2023.
The Iwate expansion is distinct from Kioxia's existing Fab2 facility in the same prefecture. The new plant will focus on production of memory chips tailored to AI workloads, a segment that has driven pricing recoveries across the semiconductor industry over the past 18 months. Major cloud providers including Microsoft, Google and Amazon have publicly disclosed spending plans centered on securing memory supply for large language models and inference operations.
Kioxia is 49.9 percent owned by Bain Capital and SK Hynix, with the remainder held by Japanese public entities and banks. The company exited bankruptcy protection in 2022 after a three-year restructuring. Its last major capacity expansion was announced in 2024 for its existing Yokkaichi facility.
The company's move follows comparable investments by competitors. Micron said in May it would spend $15 billion to expand capacity in the United States and Japan. Samsung announced a $20 billion investment in AI chip production in South Korea in June. SK Hynix committed $46 billion to advanced memory facilities in South Korea and Taiwan earlier this year.
Memory supply remains tight relative to AI infrastructure spending. Industry analysts estimate that data center capital expenditure reached $60 billion globally in 2025, with memory representing 20-25 percent of that total. Kioxia's $6.27 billion facility would take approximately three to four years to reach full production capacity, according to typical timelines for fabrication plant construction in Japan.
