Kioxia Holdings officially announced plans to construct the K3 building at its Kitakami Plant in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, aiming to begin operations during fiscal 2029 through a joint investment of approximately ¥1.8 trillion with its partner SanDisk.
Kioxia, a major semiconductor memory manufacturer, officially announced on 27 August that it would construct a new building, the K3 building, at its Kitakami Plant in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture. Construction of the new building will take place within the Kitakami Plant, with operations targeted to begin during fiscal 2029. The joint investment with SanDisk will total approximately ¥1.8 trillion.
The expansion is driven by growing demand for AI. As demand from data centers surges, the shift from training to inference is increasing demand for high-capacity storage. Kioxia maintains a top-tier global share of the NAND flash memory market. The new building is intended to establish mass-production capacity for leading-edge products and meet growing global demand.
At the Kitakami Plant, sample shipments of 10th-generation memory have already begun from the No. 2 manufacturing building, which is scheduled to begin operations in September 2025. Data processing speed has improved by 33% and storage capacity by 59% compared with the previous generation. The addition of the K3 building will strengthen the production base for next-generation products.
On 27 August, President Ota Hiroo (太田 裕雄) visited the Prime Minister's Office and met with Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae (高市早苗). He conveyed a policy of making large-scale investments totaling approximately ¥5 trillion in Japan through 2032, jointly with SanDisk and premised on government support. He also expressed the view that the government expects the development and production of next-generation memory semiconductors to expand in Japan.